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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   29835 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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My experience with normies, mostly co-workers, is that there's mild awareness of AI, but mostly in a "oh no, are management going to make us learn this as well?" kind of way. It sounds like yet another annoying thing that management might require everybody to learn and use, when we'd really all prefer to just get on with our jobs.

Managers themselves are interested in it and moderately enthusiastic - the most recent pitch has been for an AI tool that's supposed to listen to conversations and then accurately transcribe them, thus improving accountability and documentation - but that enthusiasm is not mirrored on the ground at all.

Absolutely nobody knows who Sam Altman is, or what 'AGI' stands for. Nobody.

My impression overall is not that people are dogmatically anti-AI, or have some strong ideological stand against it. It's just another instance of stupid computer bullshit that the bosses are going to try to make us deal with. Nobody likes it, but nobody likes any of the digital systems that get promoted from above. It's just plain old more of the same.

Absolutely nobody knows who Sam Altman is

Nobody knows who Sam Altman is, but "AI CEO who's stealing all the water" has filtered all the way down to my rod and gun club.

that's supposed to listen to conversations and then accurately transcribe them, thus improving accountability and documentation

It would need to get way better than the current AI models on Youtube videos, which routinely misspell and misuse words because they can't extrapolate from context and are just going by the sound of the word.

When I see "Sam Altman", I always think of Mahasamatman from Zelazny's Lord of Light.

Where do you draw the line between "normie" and "nerd" or whatever else?

I suppose the implicit heuristic I'm using is something like "knows how to use a computer". I'm thinking of co-workers who do fine with the systems they've been taught but the moment the computer does something they didn't expect, they call for IT or ask me.

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