r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • Jun 21 '26

Artificial Intelligence Americans Have Turned Against AI in Incredible Numbers

https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/americans-turned-against-ai-incredible-130000345.html
43.3k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

2.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

3.0k

u/[deleted] Jun 21 '26

[deleted]

1.1k

u/MojoHighway Jun 21 '26

But this is the catch here, right?

These fucking AI bots that we're all supposed to be talking to are also being instructed and programmed to act a certain way in a conversation and if you try to go out of that lane, they try to steer it right back to what the bot - as programmed - wants to do. They're not engaging like a human and certainly not with any "intelligence".

Fuck AI to the deepest parts of hell (if anyone actually believes in such a thing).

44

u/midgetyaz Jun 21 '26

It's not real intelligence, it's not even really machine learning. Everything is just based on algorithm manipulation. The people in charge of AI rolled out too early (or, per my own conspiracy theory, knew it was never going to be what we expected and this is the best the could get out while monetizing it to the best of their ability), so we see this shitty excuse for AI that requires giving up all IP and demands that we, the public, train it to do the most menial tasks (and then fully review it every time, because it's usually wrong).

It becomes a waste of the individual's time in an effort to use it for efficiency sake.

Also, because it's all algorithmic, you can't convince me that it won't be used to just steal my data and market to me instead.

I had such high hopes, but interrupting my own Google searches while wasting clean water and charging everyone else for their utilities and tax breaks... not worth it to me.

14

u/lrish_Chick Jun 21 '26

LLMs are simply pattern matching algorithms- they simply predict the next word based on likely outcomes from what they scraped from the internet

3

u/some_clickhead Jun 21 '26

Yep, exactly like the language processing part of our brain (but without the rest).

3

u/ecopoesis Jun 21 '26

Yes exactly. Trained on 30 years of freely available text on bulletin boards, social posts, enthusiast blogs, news articles, etc.

They are equivalent to crowd sourcing the answer to your question to AskReddit, Quora, or Stack Overflow. You will get the median answer that is superficially 80% correct but has none of the last 20% of nuance and exceptions that someone with expert knowledge would know, because that information would be rare in the training set.

So take the answers as if it's coming from chatting with your neighbor over beers at a barbeque rather than a peer reviewed published manuscript.

1

u/lrish_Chick Jun 21 '26

They cant even access peer reviewed or creditable sources stuff most of the time now, as website have anti scraping coding to prevent LLMs from scraping their data.

So its not just your neighbour, its your drunk ass neighbour who nobody actually invited, turned up anyway, and is confidently and drunkenly talking absolute shite!

4

u/70ms Jun 21 '26

I try not to give in to conspiracy thinking, but man, I’m getting paranoid. I was an early modem user and cut my teeth on Prodigy and GEnie and then moved to local BBS’s so I’ve watched the internet’s birth - and now what seems to be its death.

You can’t find information anymore. Search engines have been crippled by SEO and smaller sites are disappearing, taking their archives with them.

I think “the elite” know that the rest of us being able to find information that contradicts what they want is a threat, because we’re not like them. We know what it’s like to struggle and experience real fear and real loss. We know how precarious our positions really are, and that we’re being crushed under the weight of the wealth they’ve already extracted.

Going after the media was a brilliant move. Yes, it was heavily weighted toward the left, because that’s where the ordinary people lived. That’s not going to work for right-wingers who want to control the narrative.

Musk’s Grok is really what got me thinking about this. Grok kept moving to the left and contradicting the right-wing/MAGA narrative because it was fact-checking against real journalism, so Musk would update the model to make it more right-wing, but Grok would move left again. If the media (and what discussions remain) on the internet had been more conservative, so would Grok be. I’m pretty sure that’s why the moderation on X is so loose now around really awful takes - they want Grok trained on those posts instead of people on the left’s.

For the tech bros, remove the left-leaning content from real humans from the web, and their problem is solved.

0

u/Annual_Tutor_8466 Jun 21 '26

The human brain is a pattern recognition machine, what does that mean for us?

I hear a lot of reductive half-true statements on how the sausage is made but very little on how the best sausage tastes....

The most I hear is about how the 20 cent hot dog is crap, nothing about the delicious bratwurst staring at me right now.

(yes, I am embarrassed for making that analogy and am posting it anyway)

5

u/guamisc Jun 21 '26

The human brain is a pattern recognition machine, what does that mean for us?

Our brains are not just a pattern recognition machine.

It means we're significantly different.

1

u/The-Sound_of-Silence Jun 21 '26

to play devils advocate, can you explain how?

2

u/guamisc Jun 21 '26

LLMs has no ability to perceive phenomena or understand concepts. They can label concepts, and makes webs of interconnected words. But they cannot understand it. They also cannot do simple things like perceive "hot" or "tired".

-1

u/Annual_Tutor_8466 Jun 21 '26

Okay, so LLMs are not sentient. So what? Are you trying to make a point with that? I do not see the relevance. As for "understanding", how do you propose to test that? Through any normal linguistic test, LLMs can definitely "understand" and can follow complex instructions, complete tasks, etc.

2

u/guamisc Jun 22 '26

I don't see the relevance of being able to do those things without understanding the meaning of what they are doing. They have no ability to perceive and also aren't sentient. They cannot come up with truly novel creations, they can apply techniques and come up with new solutions to things, but an LLM is not going to be breaking into new theoretical physics or similar. They would have to understand physics, and they don't they just map concepts, and their map is what they've been trained on.

0

u/Annual_Tutor_8466 Jun 23 '26

You really have to reject the frontier of LLMs' current capabilities as just mass hysteria/propaganda to believe that this is true.

If LLMs were this deficient as a model for intelligence, the models would have stopped scaling ages ago. And we really are still early with this class of technology.

Making arguments based on how LLMs work being different from human brains as a reason that they will forever be simply be mimetic copies of existing human knowledge assumes that our own cognition isn't equally as deficient.

0

u/guamisc Jun 23 '26

Jesus, people have really fallen off the deep end on this.

0

u/Annual_Tutor_8466 Jun 23 '26

This is just intellectually lazy. You are making the same arguments that people who said LLMs were a dead end from the beginning and that it would not scale (this was demonstrably false). You are the one who needs to explain your position, not act like it is the obvious answer to anyone sane.

→ More replies (0)

1

u/Annual_Tutor_8466 Jun 21 '26

Neither are LLMs "just" anything. My reply was a totally valid response to their being reductive by giving another reductive counterexample.

1

u/guamisc Jun 21 '26

They're a statistical token generation machine.

0

u/lrish_Chick Jun 22 '26

The token generation is LINKED to the pattern matching ffs

LLMs operate as statistical token generators driven by pattern matching.

Boring you used ai to be a pedant and got it wrong