The rapid spread of artificial intelligence has people wondering: who’s most likely to embrace AI in their daily lives? Many assume it’s the tech-savvy – those who understand how AI works – who are most eager to adopt it.
Surprisingly, our new research (published in the Journal of Marketing) finds the opposite. People with less knowledge about AI are actually more open to using the technology. We call this difference in adoption propensity the “lower literacy-higher receptivity” link.
Maybe. People with more technical knowledge should understand that LLMs aren’t magic or sentient and have some severe limitations. Hell, I have been tinkering with ML and ANNs for a better part of 15 years or so and they can be extremely useful. (I am no expert and never indend to be.)
It’s the marketing wank, scams, art theft and all the bullshit that pisses me off now. In that regard, I am squarely in the “Fuck AI” category. There is absolutely nothing phenomenal that has come of this recent bubble in the commercial space. AI generated images are mostly trash, articles are riddled with gross factual errors, phishing and other scams are more realistic (and maybe even more dynamic) now and public forums contain even more annoying bots. And the worst bit is that AI generated media, like music, is just a collection of averaged values with no originality.
That bell curve represents something but it isn’t IQ.
It’s probably that people familiar with the technicals of AI don’t automatically assume it’s LLMs being talked about. There’s several other types being out to very good use, especially in the sciences right now.
Even LLMs have their place as interpretors for those other types. Having natural language interpretation that is fairly accurate the vast majority of the time is a powerful tool with a lot of applications. Near Real time translation or closed captioning is great for accessibility.