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The more young people use AI, the more they hate it (The Verge, 4/30) + comments on the article
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/920401/gen-z-ai-snip-
Meg Aubuchon, a 27-year-old art teacher living in Los Angeles, says their response and that of many of their peers has been to avoid chatbot tools entirely. “It just makes me want to dig my heels into a career where I never have to use AI, even if that’s a career that isn’t going to pay as well,” Aubuchon told The Verge.
-snip-
Sharon Freystaetter, 25, went to school for computer science at a young age and spent three years working as a cloud infrastructure engineer at a major Silicon Valley company. But right as AI hype really started to take off, she left the company, citing ethical concerns and anxiety over the environmental impacts of data centers. Now, she has left the tech industry for good, and says she avoids chatbots and disables AI features in applications whenever possible.
“I think everyone in my immediate peer group is not using AI and is actively against it, besides my friends who are in computer science and are essentially mandated to use it,” Freystaetter, who is now a food service worker in New York, told The Verge. “When I came back and started to look around [for tech jobs], suddenly everything was saying ‘You need to use AI to get this job’ in the requirements.”
-snip-
There’s one other explanation for Gen Z’s stance on AI tools that isn’t measured in data points: AI use has become culturally toxic, and many young people (like their older counterparts) won’t admit to using it out of social shame. The use of AI-generated visuals and text is frequently a subject of ridicule on social media, and any anecdotal sampling of young people will suggest that most find it fake and deeply uncool — especially when it’s used to circumvent the creative process and pass off ugly-looking slop as “AI art.”
-snip-
Meg Aubuchon, a 27-year-old art teacher living in Los Angeles, says their response and that of many of their peers has been to avoid chatbot tools entirely. “It just makes me want to dig my heels into a career where I never have to use AI, even if that’s a career that isn’t going to pay as well,” Aubuchon told The Verge.
-snip-
Sharon Freystaetter, 25, went to school for computer science at a young age and spent three years working as a cloud infrastructure engineer at a major Silicon Valley company. But right as AI hype really started to take off, she left the company, citing ethical concerns and anxiety over the environmental impacts of data centers. Now, she has left the tech industry for good, and says she avoids chatbots and disables AI features in applications whenever possible.
“I think everyone in my immediate peer group is not using AI and is actively against it, besides my friends who are in computer science and are essentially mandated to use it,” Freystaetter, who is now a food service worker in New York, told The Verge. “When I came back and started to look around [for tech jobs], suddenly everything was saying ‘You need to use AI to get this job’ in the requirements.”
-snip-
There’s one other explanation for Gen Z’s stance on AI tools that isn’t measured in data points: AI use has become culturally toxic, and many young people (like their older counterparts) won’t admit to using it out of social shame. The use of AI-generated visuals and text is frequently a subject of ridicule on social media, and any anecdotal sampling of young people will suggest that most find it fake and deeply uncool — especially when it’s used to circumvent the creative process and pass off ugly-looking slop as “AI art.”
-snip-
Much more at the link. Much of that is about recent news articles, surveys and studies I've already posted about here, but it's a useful summary of what's creating the backlash if you haven't sern my earlier threads.
This Verge article was posted in Reddit's r/technology subreddit or forum 8 hours ago and already has 1.2K replies and 14K upvotes (total likes even with downvotes subtracted).
Some of the comments:
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1szusu6/the_more_young_people_use_ai_the_more_they_hate_it/
With AI it feels like management is getting excited for something they don’t understand. And then the onus is on the workers to find a use for this stupid new tool. It’s utterly bizarre.
Imagine you’re being fired and replaced by someone who you know can sort of kind of do your job on paper but will 100% fuck it up.
It just straight up lies and then apologizes when you present it with sources that contradict its claims. If I wanted to be lied to and have my ass kissed, I can think of several earth friendly ways to satisfy that.
When you shoot me AI-generated text, I can tell and I think less of you for it.
Wait you're telling me you don't like a product forced onto you that's decimating the economy, the climate, local towns and their electricity supply, jobs, and it's going to replace you one day????? How dare you.
AI is great for making untalented people feel talented, so you can understand why executives love it
As I see it there are a dozen serious downsides to this tech and only one proposed advantage - speed - and I'm not won over on the speed thing being real once you consider the big picture. When you account for big fixing and long term maintenance my money is on it being neutral or even a disadvantage to use llms generation.
Ive had simple programming questions return dangerous suggestions that could corrupt my entire OS. Literally the first result of google was stack overflow saying never do this or you might corrupt your entire os. Right under the AI telling be to do it.
Probably a combination of the tech being oversold beyond its actual capability, the insistent shoehorning of the tech into every possible avenue of the private sector, AND the obvious limitations to anyone who has used a LLM for more than 5 minutes. Its extremely easy to hate.
Using AI is like playing Russian Roulette with the truth.
I asked AI a simple question about my car because I didn't want to spend the time digging up my owners manual. AI gave me the answer and cited the online owners manual. Great... except it was the wrong answer and when I investigated, the answer didn't even match the owners manual it supposedly pulled the answer from.
They're using something they're being told will somehow make their futures great by taking all their jobs and the product is absolutely shit. Of course they hate it.