I was talking to my father in law today and he's worried that it's going to skynet us or like, make us dependent on it and then quit helping or something.

I tried explaining that it's not a robot, it's not an AI, it's not C-3PO. It's a very elaborate autocomplete. It can't even do kindergarten level arithmetic consistently, which a basic calculator can accomplish, and it's because it's just autocomplete.

"Yeah, but what if it starts teaching itself."

I love the man but God damn people think this thing is so much more than it is.

I'm sorta the opposite: social relationships are so shallow and superficial in late stage capitalism that most social relationships can be replaced with a chatbot. If your social relationships can be summed up as water cooler conversations with coworkers and catching up with your drinking buddies, you might as "socialize" with a chatbot instead. Say what you will about a chatbot, but at least a chatbot won't stab you in the back like the case of socializing with coworkers or turn you into a functioning alcoholic like the case of socializing at a bar.

If your social relationships are limited to having pointless conversations about the weather or traffic or your favorite sports team, then what is the point of the social relationship in the first place?

I think Americans are primed to feel very enthusiastic about anything that tells them things they already believe, even moreso if it sounds very confident and organized. And people are already prone to woowoo stuff.

I don't think you'd break the spell if you informed everyone it's just lines of code that doesn't think. A statistically significant number of Americans claim to talk with spirits and angels, or have the gift of prophecy. On the flip side the techbro types believe in garbage like the future basilisk AI that tortures evseryone forever. These same people are already deranged, all the LLM does is organize their mashed potato brains into sentences that can be read. And just about every major LLM seems primed to have a very servile, docile writing style so it's trivial to get them to say whatever you want so long as you keep saying the same thing. They're not well designed for confrontation.

I firmly believe one of the best ways to deal with reactionaries, woowoo types peddling scams, or conspiracy theorists is to simply tell them they're a fucking idiot. "That sounds fucking stupid. Shut up, nerd, and never speak to me about this again." That's how you do it, that's how you dispell stuff. Social embarrassment and confrontation.

An LLM won't do that, it'll rub a nice mental salve on your already smooth brain. It's an actual echo chamber.

The appeal of LLMs seems uncomfortably similar to how Thomas Jefferson enthusiastically employed dumb waiters to limit interaction with enslaved people.

Not sure I'd generalize like that. IMO you'll find very obvious correlations between the people who tend to use AI regularly because they're living Dunning Kruger types who always believe they have the great "talent" or "the genious idea" but just need the magic tool to make it work, those who have been "forced" to use it at work e.g some programmers and finaly those that as you say just make excuses for it and may not even use it but nevertheless consume the slop consciously and happily(e.g r/chatgpt users) .

I'd guess is a significant majority of the average population who live outside these bubbles are far less favorable towards AI.

The other day someone told me that their partner used ChatGPT instead of going to therapy.

We’re all so cooked.

I think it also has something to do with how distanced most of us are from creation and maintenance of machines, particularly electronics. if you don't quite understand what a transistor is, or how code works, or how a large language model turns inputs into outputs, then "well there must be a little dude in there somewhere" makes as much sense as anything. Plus people tend to personify inanimate objects to begin with.

Its just commodity fetishism to a higher level.

I don’t really understand how to explain to people who don’t understand that chatgpt is the same as when your phone guesses what you’re going to say next word, but on turbo mode. If they still don’t get it after that then I don’t know what to do to explain it further. Just fucking get it man!!

Eh, back in the day we were getting advice from people who stood over cracks in the ground and got high off ethane or tossing knucklebones (as one of the less gross options) to see the future. Humans have always been susceptible to magical thinking and a lot of us can remember when personal computing was barely functional, so it's not surprising that ChatGPT seems like a quantum leap to some people.

The fact that someone has written a program that's capable of convincing people that it's god still has terrifying implications and I for one am not excited about the prospect of a wave of computer-inspired stochastic terrorism, but I don't think this is a sign that contemporary people are uniquely dumb.

Also add in the fact that public school education is abysmal and burger brains think a computer that can do some basic common sense shit is godlike.