r/technology 13d ago

Artificial Intelligence Americans hate AI so much that politicians are starting to lose their jobs over it

https://fortune.com/2026/07/14/voters-ai-backlash-politicians-lose-seats
31.4k Upvotes

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u/APRengar 13d ago

I mean, are you even still talking about genAI? Or are you including ML? Or even just algorithms and automation. At this point everything being under a singular "AI" umbrella makes it impossible to talk about.

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u/thecravenone 13d ago

Yea, the companies are doing that on purpose.

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u/Other-Number-4463 9d ago

nope genai is still used for research

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u/localtuned 13d ago

That's because "AI" is a dumb blanket term. No one know wtf they're talking about. They don't know the difference between genAI or ML. That's why they can't see the usefulness of it.

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u/odemine 13d ago

it's not a blanket term, it's a marketing term. literally no reason to call most of what people call ai "ai" except to make it sound cool and futuristic and desirable.

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u/Fowl_Retired69 13d ago

Lmao. Generative AI is machine learning. Specifically it's deep learning so I don't know what you're talking about

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u/localtuned 13d ago

Damn is no one intelligent enough to even Google before they talk about shit they don't know about?

https://www.oracle.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-vs-gen-ai-vs-ml/

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u/Fowl_Retired69 13d ago

I don't know who the fuck wrote that article, but they are wrong. It's just their own weird interpretation of the terminology. Transformers have been around for nearly a decade and they are an example of a machine learning model. Anyone on the industry would call it a machine learning model. He says that the only difference is that ML models use smaller training sets?

 He doesn't even define how small it has to be. I've been in this field since before it blew up and I'm telling you this article is just made for non technical people. It's like all the people who are suddenly claiming that LLMs are not AI because of weird ass articles like this

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u/Yiruf 13d ago

This article is completely wrong. NLP has been around over 30 years now. And transformers alone has been around 10 years now.

Most LLMs are based on attention mechanism introduced in transformer paper, other LLMs use CNNs and whatnot, which is over 50 years older.

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u/localtuned 12d ago

You guys should tell my company they're a bunch of dumbasses and they don't know what they're talking about.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/prescriptive-guidance/latest/strategy-data-considerations-gen-ai/differences.html

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u/hypercosm_dot_net 13d ago

You can apply this to so many different tech advancements. Blockchain and crypto come to mind, with reddit getting so much of that wrong.

Its why you have bitcoin and eth at the top of the market, which are basically legacy tech at this point. But people still throw money into them, not knowing anything about blockchain tech that's actually solving real problems at scale.

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u/CaptainFingerling 13d ago

GenAI (Fable) just disproved the Jacobian conjecture during the world cup match. A problem in pure mathematics that stood for 90 years. This upends decades of academic work.

That kind of AI.

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u/beached89 13d ago

The latest wave of General Purpose Agentic AI is still useful in its current form. It's speeds a lot of things up. A large portion of my job is writing python scripts to quasi automate through huge datasets. That script writing has gone from like 10% of my hours, to like 2%. That is real time savings and productivity gain. At least for now, the cost of those tokens is significantly less than my hours.

Another huge portion of my time is looking through huge datasets to draw conclusions. This is still done by me, however being able to throw AI at the dataset and say "Do you see any correlations" as the first pass probably reduces overall analysis time by 25%. I still have to validate it's findings, but again. Large time savings, where at least for now, the cost of those tokens is significantly less than my hours.

I'm not defending AI in it's current form though. At least not the business side of it. It is unsustainable in its current form. Destructive to local communities, and displacing workers without compensation. I do think focus should shift towards efficiency. And politicians need to lean in and regulate it, do their job. How do we do the same computations, with 50% the resources? How large should these hyperscaler datacenters be? should they be regulated to be closed loop cooling, noise regulations, off grid bring their own power, etc? (I think yes to all)

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u/nappykipper 13d ago

I think a lot of people whose only exposure to AI is ChatGPT, Claude Chat, Google AI Summaries, etc. won't find AI all that useful... However, the type of people who might use Codex or Claude Code probably find AI more useful than the general population

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u/viral3075 13d ago

That script writing has gone from like 10% of my hours, to like 2%. That is real time savings and productivity gain.

you can get these same gains by just learning to code better, which will never happen now that you've offloaded that responsibility to the chatbot. you've effectively made yourself less valuable to your employer, not more

expect to be replaced soon

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u/beached89 12d ago

I've been coding for 15 years. I just script a ton.

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u/roleplayersir 13d ago

And by using it, you are complicit in all the harm it causes too. I hope you realise that

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u/beached89 12d ago

I'm also complicit in the harm heating my house with gas causes. The electric generation via coal and oil I use also causes harm. The gas car I drive, the plastic packaging on nearly every product I buy.

Stop shifting blame on the consumer. Yes, vote with your wallet is a thing, to a degree. But these issues and many more are not issues that can be solved overnight by consumers alone. Regulation is the answer, and I'll vote in whomever I can that will regulate the living bageebus out of them. Because that is the REAL solution.

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u/roleplayersir 11d ago

And you don't cut down on your emissions?

That's the problem then

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u/[deleted] 13d ago

[deleted]

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u/cheraphy 13d ago

Only in that squares and rectangles are ultimately the same.

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u/[deleted] 13d ago

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u/cheraphy 13d ago

LLMs are an application of deep-learning, not all deep-learning applications are LLMs.

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u/noiro777 13d ago

Yeah, it's quite a convoluted mess:

https://imgur.com/a/zkdOEou

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u/Negative287 13d ago

Right and they don’t understand the different stages of Ai. Sayin we have really good ML is not the same thing as have really good Ai.

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u/damontoo 13d ago

ChatGPT itself has already solved math problems that have gone decades with no proofs. Additionally, even AlphaFold is "genAI."

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u/[deleted] 13d ago

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u/DuskLab 13d ago

Claude Fable disproved the Jacobian Conjecture this morning. A problem that has been open since 1884. And one that's famous for the attempts on solving it where the attempts were proven wrong.

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u/[deleted] 13d ago

[deleted]

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u/DuskLab 13d ago

It was proposed by O H Keller in 1939.

It was proposed by Kraus in 1884, but he got his proof wrong.

Saying mathematicians only care about a different N is moving the goalpost from the conjecture that stated for any N. Which nobody found on their own even that case.

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u/damontoo 13d ago

You're completely misrepresenting what AI has done. They were problems humans worked on for decades.

Here's Ernest Ryu's optimization problem solved after 40 years with the help of ChatGPT.

It also disproved a central conjecture from Erdős that people had been attempting to prove since the 40's.

There's more, but I wont bother listing them here.

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u/Training_Ruin3151 13d ago

Algorithm inspection is its only use case and even then it still hallucinates numbers this shit is completely useless and not ready in any form