You might be in a bubble, there are a lot of people who consider AI to be useless. It seems you do not take them seriously writing it off as fringe, which is why you consider the discussion to be between evil vs benevolent. And to be clear, my personal view on current LLM is closer to this article. But “all AI is useless” is still part of the discussion, not that it’s literally useless but that its use cases are so minor and/or inferior to existing techniques compared to its resource usage that it’s functionally useless.

Edit: I guess I see the discussion along two axes: Impact magnitude (useless vs just a tool vs god-like) and Impact valence (evil/negative vs neutral vs benevolent/positive) - this article is middle ground for the former axis, magnitude

You're definitely in a bubble if you think "nobody" considers AI useless.

There are a huge number of non-technical people who see its use as a dangerous outsourcing of human thinking and creativity to a machine that is only capable of producing derivative (and often incorrect) slop.

There are an enormous number of people such as myself that work in tech and believe the same exact thing.

At the end of the way we dont need to argue about this. The truth should be empirically knowable. If it's as useful as people say, it will show up in the GDP numbers (I wonder what's taking it so long...).

I'll echo the other reply: This seems like a bubble.

I come across the AI-skeptical perspective in my real life frequently.

I only really run into the "god AI" perspective here / among other people working in software.

My social groups are almost exclusively non-techie. I am regularly exposed to networks that are very, very far away from HN. I assure you, there are people think AI is useless and purely harmful (in the sense of creating "slop," wasting electricity and water, etc. not evil AI). And there are a lot of them.

To be fair, the general public have been conditioned for a while now by things like blockchain and VR to be completely underwhelmed, perhaps rightfully so, by whatever's coming out of San Fran and Seattle.

So in the public consciousness it's like (NFTs, meme coins, metaverse, AI)

When I think it's more like (internet, smartphones, AI)

We'll see who's right in a few years I guess. But I'll +1 your view that plenty of people put AI in the first group, I know a few myself.