if ai stans want to build trust in AI, they should have embraced sensible regulation instead of spending millions to elect pols unwilling to lift a single finger.
congrats, you have regulatory captured the entire industry and the U.S. government. everybody hates you because they can see money leaving their community to inflate the stock portfolio of some asshole on a yacht.
This feels like fake news, like the people asked leading questions. going by what I actually see, I see regular people using ai constantly at coffee shops and cafes all over the world. Non tech friends tell me all the things they are doing with ai from various learning things to planning parties to organizing meetings, designing business plans, etc
I see no evidence American’s don’t trust AI so I suspect loaded questions
Large numbers of people don't trust social media but still use it. People complain about unhealthy food but eat it. People worry about microplastics but drink bottled water. And so on.
It's quite common in modern society that people use things they don't particularly like, for a variety of reasons. One is that the society is being structured so that it's difficult to avoid its most toxic parts.
As it relates to AI, it certainly doesn't help that everyone is being told they need to learn AI or risk being eliminated by it.
Well, the worrying thing about using AI is how you regulate something you don't understand. I mean, the sequence of weights an AI has to give answers... they're not even very sure how a specific personality emerges with certain weights... so regulation seems a bit distant.
I wonder if having the world's largest search engine putting it front and center for every search query and can't disable it has something to do with it. Or for the world's largest social media platforms put it front and center and you can't disable it. Or for every employer mandating its use. Surely the people just love it so much they can't help but gravitate to these tools.
If you leave large metro areas you'll find people are absolutely rabidly against AI. Go to a little blue collar town and ask about it where there are no hip coffee shops for wfh techies.
I have worked in software since 2007 and I have been unemployed for almost 6 months. Getting any new job will require me to use AI tools, even if I think they’re awful, harmful bullshit. I am one of the people you might see using AI, and I absolutely hate it.
The problem is more general. Trust in American institutions peaked in the 1950s. Starting in the 1960s, Americans began to slowly withdraw from institutions, and also distrust them. Robert Putnam covers this in his book "Bowling Alone." Americans stopped going to the local meetings of their local town government, and Americans became more suspicious of local decisions. Americans became less interested in local news and more interested in national news (partly that was the shift in news-consumption-habits away from the local paper and towards national television). Americans slowly became more likely to believe in conspiracy theories of all kinds. During the 1970s, Americans demanded more democracy from their institutions, and many reforms were passed, including the Sunshine Laws, that were passed in almost all 50 states, making government more transparent, yet Americans became less trusting despite the greater transparency. Also during the 1970s, Americans demanded that the inner workings of Congress be made more democratic, and so the committee chairmen were stripped of their powers and each committee became purer in its democracy, which caused more procedural motions, which slowed down the actual work, which caused Americans to trust Congress less. Barbara Sinclair wrote a famous book (at least it was famous within the world of political science) called "Unorthodox Lawmaking" which tracks the breakdown of the normal lawmaking processes of Congress during the period from 1970 to 2015. All of these trends were mild from 1960 to 2000 and then they accelerated after 2000. Americans became less trusting of church, government, charity, the police, the teachers, the newspapers, the Fed, the CIA, the FBI, the unions, the Boy Scouts, and Americans became more divided over the military. There was an increase in general paranoia. The current frenzy over AI is part of the longer trend.
From what I can tell, all of America's institutions were reformed during the era after 1970 and yet Americans became less trustful of those same institutions. It is likely that some of the reforms had negative side effects, especially the attempt to make the committees inside of Congress more pure in their democracy, thereby making them less effective.
I don't think they'd hate AI so much if they didn't see it as being controlled by the same people (and types of people) who made Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Amazon, Netflix, Google, etc. all go downhill over the last decade and suck.
Having Claude calculate which beers are the best deal at the bar based on price to alcohol from a picture of the menu is currently a massive party trick.
Outside of programmers, almost no one has actually seen AI be useful for anything except do a barely acceptable job at a task they could have done better if they felt like it.
Not all programmers with AI mandates have seen this yet either.
uh yeah, all the subscriber numbers from ai companies are because it was baked into every product humans already used on their tech i.e. browsers and search engines.
Turns out, people listen to what the tech ceos had to say. Many of them said themselves AI would replace many jobs. This was used as a selling point. Ads, speeches, interviews all reinforced this point.
Wasn't the fault of "fear-mongering" media. This stuff directly came from the AI companies and their biggest fans. No surprise many people saw AI as a threat. Especially young people who were told junior positions were at risk.
What is the use case for the average non-technical person?
LLMs are cool and all but I feel like the average person is not really getting enough value out of them to keep the "wow this thing will probably make me jobless in 5 years" thoughts out.
My mom uses to take and create pictures of things: identifying birds, identifying trees, and showing her house with different decor. I didn't teach her any of this, she just figured it out on her own.
A non-tech friend of mine who's writing a book uses it to get feedback on his writing. He's gotten pretty good at crafting prompts to get it to be fairly objective.
Another non-tech friend used it to do a lot of journaling and processing after a recent breakup.
A non-techy friend who happens to work in tech uses it to make presentations at work.
Another non-techy friend of mine who works at a tech startup uses it to browse LinkedIn and find people she's searching for.
My point is that I just don't think the value-add for any of these are worth the existential dread most people have about losing their career.
Then there's the scams, misinformation, trying to find a job when every recruiter is using AI to filter job listings, etc.
j/k, but I'm pretty sure you could substitute "AI" with a few other keywords here that a lot of people use/depend on: Govt, Healthcare, Social Security, Airport security, heck maybe even science.
The real question is how do you scale something without eroding trust. Transparency has to be part of it but I doubt that it's the only piece of the puzzle and no matter how good your intentions are, there are always people that will refuse their trust (I'm not judging, it's just a fact). As a distributed systems person, I think systems in general work best when they can deal with mistrust and people choose to rather than being forced to use your system to solve their problems. AI is not there yet.
if ai stans want to build trust in AI, they should have embraced sensible regulation instead of spending millions to elect pols unwilling to lift a single finger.
congrats, you have regulatory captured the entire industry and the U.S. government. everybody hates you because they can see money leaving their community to inflate the stock portfolio of some asshole on a yacht.
What is stans and pols?
A stan is a supporter/booster of whatever. I do not remember the origin.
Pol here is abbreviated politician.
Comes from the Eminem song Stan, about an obsessed fan named Stan.
from the eminem song stan (also possibly from super-fan)
Worth noting: article posted Apr 8, 2025
I'm curious how much has public opinion changed since then.
This feels like fake news, like the people asked leading questions. going by what I actually see, I see regular people using ai constantly at coffee shops and cafes all over the world. Non tech friends tell me all the things they are doing with ai from various learning things to planning parties to organizing meetings, designing business plans, etc
I see no evidence American’s don’t trust AI so I suspect loaded questions
Large numbers of people don't trust social media but still use it. People complain about unhealthy food but eat it. People worry about microplastics but drink bottled water. And so on.
It's quite common in modern society that people use things they don't particularly like, for a variety of reasons. One is that the society is being structured so that it's difficult to avoid its most toxic parts.
As it relates to AI, it certainly doesn't help that everyone is being told they need to learn AI or risk being eliminated by it.
Well, the worrying thing about using AI is how you regulate something you don't understand. I mean, the sequence of weights an AI has to give answers... they're not even very sure how a specific personality emerges with certain weights... so regulation seems a bit distant.
I wonder if having the world's largest search engine putting it front and center for every search query and can't disable it has something to do with it. Or for the world's largest social media platforms put it front and center and you can't disable it. Or for every employer mandating its use. Surely the people just love it so much they can't help but gravitate to these tools.
If you leave large metro areas you'll find people are absolutely rabidly against AI. Go to a little blue collar town and ask about it where there are no hip coffee shops for wfh techies.
https://x.com/projomike/status/2055850621832446432
People use it; they also understand that the end goal of AI is to automate away the vast majority of white collar jobs and enrich the capital class.
I use the internet but I don't trust it.
I have worked in software since 2007 and I have been unemployed for almost 6 months. Getting any new job will require me to use AI tools, even if I think they’re awful, harmful bullshit. I am one of the people you might see using AI, and I absolutely hate it.
how are you supposed to avoid it when it's baked into literally every product we already used the most i.e. browsers and search engines
verge is very anti-ai and they are biased against it. I like their content but a few of their writers truly see the devil in ai
The problem is more general. Trust in American institutions peaked in the 1950s. Starting in the 1960s, Americans began to slowly withdraw from institutions, and also distrust them. Robert Putnam covers this in his book "Bowling Alone." Americans stopped going to the local meetings of their local town government, and Americans became more suspicious of local decisions. Americans became less interested in local news and more interested in national news (partly that was the shift in news-consumption-habits away from the local paper and towards national television). Americans slowly became more likely to believe in conspiracy theories of all kinds. During the 1970s, Americans demanded more democracy from their institutions, and many reforms were passed, including the Sunshine Laws, that were passed in almost all 50 states, making government more transparent, yet Americans became less trusting despite the greater transparency. Also during the 1970s, Americans demanded that the inner workings of Congress be made more democratic, and so the committee chairmen were stripped of their powers and each committee became purer in its democracy, which caused more procedural motions, which slowed down the actual work, which caused Americans to trust Congress less. Barbara Sinclair wrote a famous book (at least it was famous within the world of political science) called "Unorthodox Lawmaking" which tracks the breakdown of the normal lawmaking processes of Congress during the period from 1970 to 2015. All of these trends were mild from 1960 to 2000 and then they accelerated after 2000. Americans became less trusting of church, government, charity, the police, the teachers, the newspapers, the Fed, the CIA, the FBI, the unions, the Boy Scouts, and Americans became more divided over the military. There was an increase in general paranoia. The current frenzy over AI is part of the longer trend.
From what I can tell, all of America's institutions were reformed during the era after 1970 and yet Americans became less trustful of those same institutions. It is likely that some of the reforms had negative side effects, especially the attempt to make the committees inside of Congress more pure in their democracy, thereby making them less effective.
(2025)
Misleading OP
I don't think they'd hate AI so much if they didn't see it as being controlled by the same people (and types of people) who made Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Amazon, Netflix, Google, etc. all go downhill over the last decade and suck.
Now if they could just vote for politicians and a political party that will do something about it…we might get somewhere.
And yet all of them use it...
Having Claude calculate which beers are the best deal at the bar based on price to alcohol from a picture of the menu is currently a massive party trick.
Outside of programmers, almost no one has actually seen AI be useful for anything except do a barely acceptable job at a task they could have done better if they felt like it.
Not all programmers with AI mandates have seen this yet either.
No one uses it outside of tech or office jobs. There's no use case.
uh yeah, all the subscriber numbers from ai companies are because it was baked into every product humans already used on their tech i.e. browsers and search engines.
Turns out media fear mongering for clicks works
Turns out, people listen to what the tech ceos had to say. Many of them said themselves AI would replace many jobs. This was used as a selling point. Ads, speeches, interviews all reinforced this point.
Wasn't the fault of "fear-mongering" media. This stuff directly came from the AI companies and their biggest fans. No surprise many people saw AI as a threat. Especially young people who were told junior positions were at risk.
What is the use case for the average non-technical person?
LLMs are cool and all but I feel like the average person is not really getting enough value out of them to keep the "wow this thing will probably make me jobless in 5 years" thoughts out.
My mom uses to take and create pictures of things: identifying birds, identifying trees, and showing her house with different decor. I didn't teach her any of this, she just figured it out on her own.
A non-tech friend of mine who's writing a book uses it to get feedback on his writing. He's gotten pretty good at crafting prompts to get it to be fairly objective.
Another non-tech friend used it to do a lot of journaling and processing after a recent breakup.
A non-techy friend who happens to work in tech uses it to make presentations at work.
Another non-techy friend of mine who works at a tech startup uses it to browse LinkedIn and find people she's searching for.
These are all good examples.
My point is that I just don't think the value-add for any of these are worth the existential dread most people have about losing their career. Then there's the scams, misinformation, trying to find a job when every recruiter is using AI to filter job listings, etc.
> What is the use case for the average non-technical person?
"I used the button they made biggest and closest to the top of the page."
> Most Americans
They asked 174.6 million people?
you should ask your flatterbox about random sampling
probably just a ChatGPT
j/k, but I'm pretty sure you could substitute "AI" with a few other keywords here that a lot of people use/depend on: Govt, Healthcare, Social Security, Airport security, heck maybe even science.
The real question is how do you scale something without eroding trust. Transparency has to be part of it but I doubt that it's the only piece of the puzzle and no matter how good your intentions are, there are always people that will refuse their trust (I'm not judging, it's just a fact). As a distributed systems person, I think systems in general work best when they can deal with mistrust and people choose to rather than being forced to use your system to solve their problems. AI is not there yet.