Older person here: they absolutely did, all over the place in the early 90s. I remember people decrying projects that moved them to computers everywhere I went. Doctors offices, auto mechanics, etc.
Then later, people did the same thing about the Internet (was written with a single word capital I by 2000, having been previously written as two separate words.)
There were gobs of terrible road metaphors that spun out of calling the Internet the “Information Superhighway.”
Gobs and gobs of them. All self-parody to anyone who knew anything.
I hesitate to relate this to anything in the current AI era, but maybe the closest (and in a gallows humor/doomer kind of way) is the amount of exec speak on how many jobs will be replaced.
I get why they thought that - it was kind of crappy unless you're one who is excited about the future and prepared to bleed a bit on the edge.
For me they're very different and they sound much more the crypto-skepticism. It's not like "LLMs are worthless, there are no use cases, they should be banned" but rather "LLMs do have their use cases but they also do have inherent flaws that need to be addressed; embedding them in every product makes no sense etc.". (I mean LLMs as tech, what's happening with GenAI companies and their leaders is a completely different matter and we have every right to criticize every lie, hypocrisy and manipulation, but let's not mix up these two.)
Makes me wonder if people spoke this way about “using computers” or “using the internet” in the olden days.
We don’t even fully agree on the best practices for writing code without AI.