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As an academic who has been writing about technology for decades, I honestly feel angry about the sudden appearance of thousands upon thousands of apparent "experts" with papers, books, conference invitations, national news interviews, &c... who clearly have been thinking about AI for like five fucking minutes. It's basically impossible to express that in a way that doesn't sound like sour grapes (at best), but in most cases it's just an extension of the same grift they've been running for years, only with more money spent on Anthropic subscription fees. The truth is, good, meaningful, lasting work still takes a lot more time (and, realistically, a lot less money) than anyone seems willing to admit.
The tech is super cool. It's fun to be able to get incredibly detailed images whipped up from a prompt. I get the impression that coding can happen a lot faster now, in many contexts. But the gold rush is on, and a lot of people who missed getting in on the ground floor of crypto or the Web are desperate not to miss this elevator to obscene fortune. So it's probably inevitable that the grifters and narcissists are out in force.
Academics are boring nerds who (usually) understand the serious dangers of the beautiful radioactive lake everyone is excited about, while the moron brigade is the dipshit nerd that wants to bellyflop onto the shiny new rainbow lake for likes and calls the academics pussies for not having any excitement.
I have seen many many cycles of technology promises fail to breach the messy barrier between screen and meat. All these fuckwits promising real world transformative opportunities miss how real world people fucking work in the first place. People don't use their company acquired specific AI thats been lobotomized into legally compliant ineffectiveness, they use existing tools for basic bitch work then go to microsoft word.
The fuckwit brigade shills AI because they're grifting morons, but the academics also fail to communicate the problems in understandable real human terms. If neither side speaks relatably to normies, at least the tiktok of the dipshit screaming in pain when he lands face first into the arsenic mine pit is funny. Better if we all were in the background encouraging him precisely because we want him to get hurt.
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