No, I’d definitely agree that AI sentiment overall is pretty negative. I am not such a hardliner, but they are definitely out there. I don’t see it as astroturfing at all, to even suggest this is ironic because LLMs are the ultimate astroturfing tool. The institutions capable of astroturfing do support AI and are using it. What institution or organization are you accusing of anti-AI astroturfing, exactly? This question requires an answer for that claim to be taken seriously.

IMO the problem is not LLMs itself, which are very compelling and interesting for strictly language processing and enable software 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. “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.

Plus, there are very negative consequences to generative AI that aren’t yet fully addressed. Environmental impact. Deepfakes. They’re a propaganda machine; they can be censored and reflect biases of the institutions that control them. Parasocial relationships, misguided self-validating “therapy”. They degrade human creativity and become a crutch. Impacts on education and cheating. Replacement of jobs and easier exploitation of workers. Surveillance.

All of these things are valid and I hear them all from people around me, not just on the internet.