I'll give tech people credit, but non-tech people I'm not so sure. A good example is the cookie permissions or app permissions. A great number of non-tech people don't even know or care what they mean.

You gotta stop bucketting people like that. People may not know terms "cookie permissions" or "app permissions" but they sure as fuck understand the idea of user tracking or handing a company access to your mic/camera. And to say they don't care about these things is simply not true.

There's a contingent of the population passing videos around on tiktok genuinely concerned that AIs have a mind of their own

no I will not give the public credit, most people have no grounding to discern wtf a language model is and what it's doing, all they know is computers didn't use to talk and now they do

Which people? If you are software engineers or AI researchers, sure. Otherwise, it probably won't matter to you.