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because it WAS pretty useless, or at least really unreliable, until, like, the end of last year

also the marketing wasn't just ineffective, it was non-existent, because it was directed by fascists, at other fascists, to convince them to invest their money in a fascism machine the thing that potentially saves it it that AI is kind of an "everything" machine, which includes not-fascism

mate, I'm not anti-AI but "datacenters" as a close proxy are underwater with republicans by more than 35 points, like, this is a GMO level PR disaster for industry

Lovely. I hope that ends up with companies paying more taxes and doing more to help us move to a robust grid based on renewables. Datacenters being unpopular can have lots of good effects.

Adorable optimism, 5/5

definitely the tech rollout that has drawn the most instantaneous outrage in my life. A little bit of that in “using calculators” but nowhere near this scale AI is a technology that, aside from the practical implications fun or scary, goes directly to the values people judge their self worth

I think it can be both? at least from what I saw a lot of the marketing was around productivity or things that people see as replacing creatives and not so much of things like my dad figuring out which flowers can grow together and how he can lay out his garden before going outside to actually do it

People are going to be angry about this tech replacing creatives, because ... it does do some things that people will see as replacing creatives. Maybe it was possible to spin that more cleverly? but it's not like this was an unforced error that would be easy to avoid.

not avoid entirely but there has to be some way of making the 'normal' uses more apparent too kinda like how the majority of people have only ever interacted with a free tier model and base their thinking off of that experience and not the wider possibilities you get from better ones

A blunter way to explain 3 years of controversy: these products were and are genuinely problematic. Making hard problems easier is not useless. But it has very awkward effects on education and will threaten some jobs. There was no way to market that as “it just helps you w/ Excel.”

I’ll give up on this eventually, because as adoption spreads it’s going to be *so* much easier to put old controversies behind us by explaining them as a “botched roll-out.” But that’s not really it. This technology is scary.

the tech is scary, but that's also not it: it's scary *and* people in general are terrible at thinking clearly, carefully.

I think if people change their opinion it's still a net positive, even if they have to lie to themselves about the reasons and the trajectory of how it happened :)

Probably yes. See: