The Gap between peoples opinion towards AI in everyday life vs people on Lemmy is massive and a good indicator that Lemmy is astroturfed
By who? Your conspiracy theory makes no sense. Why would anyone want to do that.
No it isn’t. There is 100% propaganda and media targeting communities to spread it.
echodot@feddit.uk 21 hours ago
Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
You really can’t imagine why corporations and political groups who spend billions paying people to manufacture narratives and flood feeds might hate the idea of ordinary people suddenly having their own free, on-demand content factory, fact-checker, and megaphone?
echodot@feddit.uk 9 hours ago
In favour of AI absolutely, against it, no I can’t. What group would want to disvalue AI, after all most of the big tech companies are developing their own. They would want people to use AI, that’s the only way they make a profit.
You keep providing these vague justifications for your belief but you never actually provide a concrete answer.
Which groups in particular do you think are paying people to astroturf with negative AI comments? Which actual organisations, which companys? Do you have evidence for this beyond “lots of people on a technically inclined forum don’t like it” because that seems to be a fairly self-selecting set. You are seeing patterns in the clouds and are insisting that they are meaningful.
Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
You call it “patterns in the clouds,” but that’s how coordinated media campaigns are meant to look organic, coincidental, invisible unless you recognize the fingerprints. Spotting those fingerprints isn’t tinfoil-hat stuff, it’s basic media literacy.
And let’s be real: plenty of groups have motives to discourage everyday people from embracing AI.
Political think tanks and content farms (Heritage Foundation, Koch networks…) already pay for astroturfing campaigns and troll farms. They do it on issues like immigration, climate, and COVID. Why would AI magically be exempt?
Reputation management/PR firms (Bent Pixels, marketing shops, crisis comms firms) literally get paid to scrub and reshape narratives online. Their business model depends on you not having the same tools for cheap or free.
Established media and gatekeepers survive on controlling distribution pipelines. The more people use AI to generate, remix, and distribute their own content, the less leverage those outlets have.
Now why does this matter with AI in particular? Because AI isn’t just another app it’s a force multiplier for individuals.
A single parent can spin up an online store, write copy, generate images, and market it without hiring an agency.
A student can build an interactive study tool in a weekend that used to take a funded research lab.
An activist group can draft policy briefs, make explainer videos, and coordinate messaging with almost no budget.
These kinds of tools only get created if ordinary people are experimenting, collaborating, and embracing AI. That’s what the “don’t trust AI” narrative is designed to discourage. If you keep people from touching it, you keep them dependent on the existing gatekeepers.
So flip your own question: who pays for these narratives? The same people who already fund copy-paste headline campaigns like “illegals are taking our jobs and assaulting Americans.” It’s the same yellow-journalism playbook, just aimed at a new target.
Dismissing this as “cloud patterns” is the exact mindset they hope you have. Because if you actually acknowledge how coordinated media framing works, you start to see why of course there are groups with the motive and budget to poison the well on AI.
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 1 day ago
Lemmy is pretty consistent with the people I know IRL in terms of opinions on AI.
Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Not where I am. I haven’t met anyone irl that has any spite with AI. They think it’s interesting. Have tried it a few times. But nobody is out there saying fuck AI.
theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world 1 day ago
No, I’d definitely agree that AI sentiment overall is pretty negative. I am not such a hardliner, but they are definitely out there.
IMO the problem is not LLMs itself, which are very compelling and interesting for strictly language processing and enable programs and usecases that were almost impossible to implement programmatically before; the problem is how LLMs are being used incorrectly for usecases that they are not suited for, due to the massive investment and hype in them. “We spent all this money on this so now we have to use it for everything”. It’s wrong. LLMs are not knowledge stores, they are provably bad at summarization and as a search interface, and they should especially not be used for decision making in any context. And people are reacting to the way LLMs are being forced into all of these roles.
People also take strong issue with their perceived violation of intellectual property and training on copyrighted information, viewing AI generated arts as derivative and theft.
PokerChips@programming.dev 13 hours ago
You’re probably debating a tool.
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 1 day ago
That was the initial impression of it. Now that we’ve had more experience with it and learned that it can’t be relied on, perception has changed. It is oversold and the costs are not worth what we are getting out of it.
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
I fed AI all my Lemmy posts and asked it for a portrait of the artist. Not bad, down to my 6 fingers.
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