A core problem with humans, or perhaps it's not even a problem, just something that takes a long time to recognize, is that they complain and hate on something that they continue to spend money on.

Not like food or clothing, but stuff like DLC content, streaming services, and LLMs.

At least in my case, I suspect they also don't keep up with the progress. They did experiments in 2023/24, were thoroughly put off, have not fired it up since. So the impression they have is frozen in time, a time when it was indeed much less impressive.

Usually different people. Or, in the case of LLMs, they're not given a no option, or it's carefully hidden.

Why do people in your circle not like AI? I have similar a experience about friends and family not liking AI, but usually it’s due to water and energy reasons, not because of an issue with the model reasoning

If your circle has any artists in it, chances are they'll also have a very negative perception, although influenced heavily by the proliferation of AI-generated art.

At least personally, I've seen basically three buckets of opinions from non-technical people on AI. There's a decent-sized group of people who loathe anything to do with it due to issues you've mentioned, the art issue I mentioned, or other specific things that overall add up to the point that they think it's a net harm to society, a decent-sized group of people who basically never think about it at all or go out of their way to use anything related to it, and then a small group of people who claim to be fully aware of the limitations and consider themselves quite rational but then will basically ask ChatGPT about literally anything and trust what it says without doing any additional research. It's the last group that I'm personally most concerned about because I've yet to find any effective way of getting them to recognize the cognitive dissonance (although sometimes at least I've been able to make enough of an impression that they stop trying to make ChatGPT a participant in every single conversation I have with them).

Pretty much hit the nail on the head in my case about artists -- although, while there are some of those, most are from traditional broadly "intellectual" fields. Some examples: writers, journalists, academia (liberal arts), publishing industry.

That's a good point; "art" might be a bit too narrow to accurately describe the type of field where people have fairly concrete concerns about how AI relates to what they produce. I'd be tempted to use the label "creative work", but even that doesn't quite feel like it's something that everyone would understand to include stuff like written journalism, which I think is likely to have pretty similar concerns.

AIs are an obvious threat to their ability to make money off their skills.