They say it's bad for society, but look at what they choose to consume.
> It's not self-evident that pointing out hypocrisy isn't a valid refutation
If I say drinking tons of sugary soda every day is bad for you, when I drink nothing but myself, how would my hypocrisy have a bearing on the effects of drinking soda? Yes, it's self-evident. It shouldn't even need saying because nobody should be so dishonest to even attempt it as an argument. It's the kind of dumb shit people say about other people, never to them.
First, people seek authenticity. In written content, people want to know there is a real human author thinking about every word, and in photos, people do not want to be deceived by deepfakes. It's much harder to tell in a world of AI slop, hence the rise of apps like Pangram. This is a significant negative externality.
Second, people who invest their time learning creative fields seek recognition for all the hard work they have put in. Now their skills are devalued, again because of slop. This is another negative externality.
Having more pictures and videos is nice in some ways but your head is in the sand if you think it's all roses.
Even if we're talking about creative arts, if people cannot tell the difference between AI-generated content and human-generated content, then how are they being harmed by the AI-generated creative content?
Assuming they value them equally and they prefer to have more content, AI is strictly a positive for people.
"Strictly a positive" is also a strange choice of words when the technology is ripping out the livelihoods of so many creators. I would accept "it has tradeoffs, but is a net positive over the long run". But the former is objectively false.
Automation will of course harm whichever sector of the economy remains on the manual processes, but it leads to more abundance overall.
Even the people who lose jobs due to automation are better off overall. If you personally consume goods and services produced by 100 different classes of professionals, and you yourself work in one of those 100 classes of professional work, and your job gets automated, you lose out in that narrow sense, but you gain from having the products and services produced by the other 99 classes of professionals, become more abundant through automation.
With respect to authenticity, that's easy to prove. Take coffee for example. People are willing to pay more for coffee that was made by hand. So what do companies do? They simply have the baristas make the coffee in front of the customers. Market incentives will produce efficient ways of proving authenticity.
What kind of ai content do you think people are watching?
> What kind of ai content do you think people are watching?
I can't think of a platform that isn't showering users with AI content no matter how much content blocking and history-disabling one does. It's at least half of everything that gets injected into feeds, especially on platforms like Instagram, and while there are many people who can recognize AI slop, enough of them continue engaging with it that it's clearly being incentivized. There are plenty of otherwise smart people I know who can't distinguish all of it from reality. Older people are especially susceptible. If you know any baby boomers who regularly use Facebook, they're almost certainly falling for AI slop all the time even if they think they're savvy enough to recognize all of it.
Don't take this the wrong way, but your phrasing of that question makes me wonder whether we're talking about two different things or if your experience with people's habits happens to be radically different from what I've seen as normative. I guess it's possible you wouldn't know what kind of AI content people tend to be watching if you've managed to distance yourself from it that much.
To answer your question now that I've rambled, tons of things are AI generated. Animal videos, dancing videos, tutorials, news, podcasts, music, etc.
Could I be wrong? Yeah, sure. My experience tells me the following:
- The vast majority of people claim to hate AI slop.
- Most people think they can reliably recognize AI slop.
- Almost everyone is getting fooled by AI in some form form at some frequency.
- AI slop almost can't be avoided without only following certain creators or content discovery, and even then it's not completely avoidable.
- I've been duped by AI slop occasionally, and I'm the guy who used to have to inform people all the time that viral videos were faking things with CGI (my family has a history in the entertainment business).
- At least half of people are more upset by the fact someone is breaking their belief in content being real than by the fact that the content intentionally fooled them.
- Most people aren't significantly changing their media consumption habits in response to AI slop.
That's why I am not particularly interested in what the average American thinks about AI. It's about as insightful as asking a woman about dating advice for men. If people overwhelmingly think AI is bad for society, then the answer would be for them to stop consuming it, yet they still do, and there's really no excuse for them to do so if they really think it's that bad.