As a general observation, I find that the more right-leaning a person is, the more they tend to be receptive to the usage and adoption of “AI”. And inversely, the more left-leaning, the more skeptical.
I pin this on the notion that most conservatives hate workers, are happy to see them laid off, etc. Whereas more progressive folks tend to see value in what human beings do.
Moreover, communists like ourselves almost completely dismiss the plagarism slop machines as being utterly misanthropic, not to mention flying in the face of the labour theory of value.
As an anecdote, I work with a conservative guy who puts EVERYTHING through Grok. Almost everything he types/says to his team mates he gets Grok to write for him. Everything he “fact-checks” goes through Grok. He views it as totally impartial, without bias, etc.
On the other hand, I think more critically-minded folks are prone to seeing the inherent bias in these chatbot slop machines, and view them with skepticism in the same way they view all other institutions in society.
Clearly I am generalising a lot here, but has anyone else made the same or similar observation?
my armchair psychologist take is that it’s related to the conservative tendency to struggle with ambiguity/uncertainty. LLMs always have an answer, will assert that their answer is correct, and since it’s a computer program, they figure it has to be neutral and giving them accurate output at least 99% of the time.
Reactionaries hating abstract art comes to mind. Or how they don’t understand subtext/literary themes (look at how many of them wish they were Tyler Durden, Patrick Bateman, Walter White, or Don Draper). I think a lot of it comes from not wanting their worldview challenged/altered.
AI gives immediate output conforming to their worldview. An abstract painting challenges their understanding of art. Nazis would have loved Grok because they could do what Trump/Musk do with Grok.
One example that comes to mind was telling a conservative former friend about a dream I had, in which a human and an alien in a first contact situation created a game together, which they then used to determine who would get a resource that could only save one of their species, both of which were threatened with extinction. The dream ended with the human winning, but the victory felt tragic and hollow because these two species had enough in common to create and play a game together, yet one of them would die through nobody’s fault. I told him the dream was emotionally striking to me and I thought I might be able to adapt this into a sci-fi short story.
He took the story as an HFY-style endorsement of alien genocide and was baffled by my attempts to explain that it was meant to be a bitter and ironic tragedy.
I also mentioned to this same friend that I thought it might be an interesting angle for a Star Wars story to be told from the view of an average grunt about how terrifying it would be to have their unit come under attack by a Force user. He went on a rant about how Force users were Mary Sues because “no one could possibly block a laser because they travel at the speed of light” and assumed that I must be a Star wars fan (we’d known each other for years and I’d never given any other possible indication that I liked Star Wars).