this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2026

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Only 16 percent of Americans think AI will have a positive impact on society, a new study shows (techcrunch.com)

submitted 4 days ago by sanitation@lemmy.today to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] IratePirate@feddit.org 58 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

If by "AI" they mean "oligarch-owned and controlled AI", we have common ground here. But then again, that is true of anything owned and monopolised by these ~~people~~ humanoids. Case in point: only few people will agree that...

oligarch-owned media empires have a positive impact on society
oligarch-owned social media networks have a positive impact on society
oligarch-owned space companies have a positive impact on society
...

The problem is not with the tech. The problem is that the tech is in the hands of a small clique of sociopaths.

[–] chuckleslord@lemmy.world 29 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Hmmmm, not much actual use for the hallucinating plagiarism machine, but I do see your point.

[–] IratePirate@feddit.org 16 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

Imo, LLMs do have a purpose (and their ethical sourcing problems, like you mentioned).

It's just that right now, Silicon Valley sells it as the answer to every single problem out there when it clearly isn't. A hammer is good for putting nails in the wall. Silicon Valley claims you can also use it to do your toenails, gullible managers mandate its use for that purpose, and now the waiting rooms are chock-full with people with broken toes...

Also, AI can be so much more than just LLMs.

[–] chuckleslord@lemmy.world 11 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I don't disagree. Most generative AI models are some variant on "plagiarism machine", but categorizing and identifying data are extremely useful things that AI does.

LLMs are good at quickly generating code, but the issue in software is rarely how fast humans can write code. In fact, more speed with less understanding is a really bad combination (I am a developer working DevOps and anecdotally I see way more large scale bugs now than I did 5 years ago).

Agentic AI is, unfortunately, just an LLM pretending to be a person, and that's a really bad thing. Like so incredibly bad. Did you know that humans are statistically more likely to make mistakes when under pressure? Cause the LLMs sure do. Create a narrative of pressure and the LLM cracks like a rotten egg. Cause that's more statistically likely!

[–] Badabinski@kbin.earth 11 points 4 days ago (2 children)

The speed and ease at which LLMs allow you to generate code is a bug, not a feature in my opinion. In my org, a group of 3 very junior engineers wrote a 5k line shell script for building k8s clusters according to our business specs and it's fucking awful. The actual time to get it out the door was short, but now it's basically impossible to change it without fucking up like 20 different things. The fucking thing will randomly quit because the shit ass LLM thinks set -e is a good thing to use, and it's full of unused variables everywhere. I had to add a feature to it (which is how I learned of its existence), and I spent a miserable week just reading the entire fucking thing so I could ensure that my change wouldn't cause an oil refinery in the North Sea to explode due to a butterfly-effect series of bullshit.

The frustration and toil you feel as a software dev is a feature. If something is making you mad and is taking forever to write, that's a sign you probably need to change your approach. If you're using an LLM to write a bunch of boilerplate, why not just eliminate the boilerplate or like, make a factory to spit out a bunch of it or something? Your discomfort is a powerful tool and you are not best served by ignoring it. Those junior devs would have written something much better if they had been forced to experience the true toil and suffering of writing a 5k line shell script.

[–] BassTurd@lemmy.world 5 points 4 days ago (3 children)

I fall in the junior category, but with more experience prior to becoming a certified full stack dev than most juniors. I was a sys admin for a decade where I taught myself how to code to simplify my job. Plus I had 1 year at university 15 years ago. I use my company provided license with AI very sparingly and never let it implement code. Mostly I use it like a glorified stack overflow when I run into a problem that I can't work out by myself. Usually, it will suggest some code that's not good, but it's enough to highlight a concept I'm ignorant to and then I can do what I need. If there's a block of code that has something that I don't understand, I can highlight it and ask it to explain. It's usually pretty good at listing out what something is doing or at least supposed to do.

I would love if AI disappeared immediately, but it's not going to happen. If someone is using, it should be used as a tool and not a replacement. If you can't do the thing that it's doing, then you shouldn't be use it to do that thing. I probably ask it questions less than once a week, and again, never put in code that I don't understand what it does and why.

I have a good friend that's a senior dev at a company using Claude code. He's become an AI code reviewer, but much to my dismay likes it. He's vibe coding his own fuck around app with it and it's writing the backend in C#, a language he doesn't know being a frontend dev. It's so infuriating to me that someone that I know to be intelligent is so damn stupid.

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[–] IratePirate@feddit.org 4 points 4 days ago

You've accurately described why having LLMs cobble together code is a terrible idea. With all the vibe-coded nonsense finding its way into production code because the amount of code generated in a short amount of time inevitably overwhelms human oversight, I wouldn't want to work in cybersec these days.

That said, I do see applications for LLMs in areas where mistakes will not get people hurt or systems breached: they can

provide a first layer of customer and tech support to solve the really stupid stuff that needs no human attention ("Have you made sure that the device is plugged in? Have you tried turning it off and on again?"). This can be particularly useful when paired with a source of truth it can draw from.
do tedious tasks involving large amounts of text processing, e.g. automated translation, cross-referencing of legal texts.
provide pre-college learners with a tutor that is available 24/7, can explain simple academic subject matters and answer questions that naturally arise as part of every learning process. Again, pair with a source of truth for more reliable results.

[–] XLE@piefed.social 5 points 4 days ago (8 children)

We can figure out how to correctly use the hammer after we convince CEOs to stop bashing everyone's feet with them. Until then, the foot bashers make it a moot point.

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[–] eestileib@lemmy.blahaj.zone 15 points 4 days ago (1 children)

The tech that the sociopaths built is an addictive control machine.

I don't care whether the person selling the cigarettes to my kid has read Fanon and volunteers at the homeless center, they're still addictive and poisonous.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

The tech that the sociopaths built is an addictive control machine.

LLMs are not addictive control machines. Social media engagement farming and native advertising/propaganda machines are addictive control machines. We consistently get the marketing functions fudged up with the utility of the thing itself. Like blaming violence on video games or talking about addictive qualities of children's cartoons.

I don’t care whether the person selling the cigarettes to my kid has read Fanon and volunteers at the homeless center

Cigarettes are actually a great example of engineered addiction. Historically, tobacco products had a mild addicting affect resulting from their short-term immediate stimulative benefits combined with the reliance on nicotine. But it wasn't until the boom in marketing of the 1920s followed by the industrial scale experimentation of the formula in the 1940s that the addictive nature of the product surged.

The end result was an enormous increase in per-capita consumption, leaping from 54 cigarettes per person per year in 1900 to 4,345 cigarettes per person per year in 1963.

The quantitative surge in consumption radically changed the health consequences of cigarette use.

You could do similar analysis on everything from alcohol consumption to LSD. From TV to TikTok. At some point you have to draw a line between the utilitarian value of the thing versus the mass market distribution and profit-driven consumption behaviors. Otherwise, you just end up with 1920s Prohibition and a thriving black market that undercuts the policies you intended.

And then you get Joe Kennedy. Is that what you want for your country? More Kennedys?

[–] DevDave@piefed.social 28 points 3 days ago

AI has already and is actively making a substantial chunk of things worse.

OpenAI has made war crimes legal

Youtube is a sea of slop

Book industry is drowning

FOSS is being openly robbed while also drowning under slop

Anti-AI paranoia is really ratcheting up and its also being exploited by AI. USAA the military savings bank has a flood of AI bots accusing humans of being bots to stifle criticism of the bank enshitifying itself. Meanwhile pre-AI video reposts have people screaming "That's AI slop!" In other places, too thorough of a text post is probably AI but it also might just be some poor neurodivergent person who is an actual expert on the subject and is excited to share.

Then there is all the layoffs and firings.

Health insurance scams are using AI to target those who are less lightly to appeal.

Stuff like the people shut out of part of the job market because an AI decided they had been rejected from too many prior applications.

Oh and the computer electronics parts market is fucked. I have a few spare DDR5 memory sticks that would now pay for a third of what my current computer cost me! Never mind the NVME spares I have on the shelf.

Actually most of the consumer electronics market is fucked. Didn't they postpone the next play station while Valve is trying to figure out if people will be cool donating a kidney or part of their liver for the VR goggles and the steam console box.

Only saving grace for me is my spelling and grammar skills seriously atrophied after using grammarly for a few years so most people look at my writing and never think "This sounds like AI!"

[–] lechekaflan@lemmy.world 12 points 3 days ago (1 children)

16%? They're called grifters and robber barons.

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[–] AcidiclyBasicGlitch@sh.itjust.works 17 points 3 days ago

I bet that 16% have already let AI talk them into some really awful financial decisions

[–] 1984@lemmy.today 16 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

The way we live is completely wrong for a human being. Wasting our lives for numbers in a computer, just enough to pay bills and waste another month.

[–] mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, modern living is so anathema to human life that the ancient greeks literally told horror stories about it. Sisyphus pissed off Zeus, and was cursed in the afterlife to eternally push a boulder up a mountain, only to have the boulder roll away from him as he neared the peak and end up at the base of the mountain again. That was meant to be an extreme torment, because the task can never actually be completed. Sisyphus is forced to spend all of his waking hours struggling, only to have the struggle reset again every day.

And now we stare at spreadsheets for 8 hours every day, doing tasks that have no end.

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[–] SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social 20 points 4 days ago (4 children)

I hate how tech bros make people hate all sorts of artificial intelligence by naming their fucking large language models AI. Without machine learning, I would have had to type this text all by myself. But look at me, speaking into a microphone. On the toilet! 😭

Fuck tech bros. Love tech. If it's the good kind of tech. The one that doesn't drink all our water and doesn't consume all our electricity. And fucking graphics cards!

[–] IratePirate@feddit.org 7 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Word! I wouldn't even say that LLMs and other generative AI are a problem*. Locally run, i.e. in the hands of the people, and used on the right task, they can be a great tool! People are just fed up with centralised oligarch tech shoved down their throats in pursuit of the Epstein class' pipe dream: lay everybody off, automate (almost) all production and keep the profits to yourself.

* well, as long as you don't look to closely at how they were trained in the first place...

[–] SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social 4 points 4 days ago

Hey, I would even look forward to being laid off due to tech becoming so advanced I'm not necessary anymore. Imagine how much fun I could have not working. It's the rich people eating up all the profit that makes me uneasy. But give me my time and enough money to play around and I'll be happy being laid off. I will still do what I do today, but not 40 hours a week. And just for fun.

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[–] chunes@lemmy.world 10 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Little that happens in this country has a positive impact on society. The only positive things that have happened during my lifetime were the ADA in 1990 and legalized gay marriage between 2003 and 2015.

[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 3 days ago

The global results from the dissolution of USAID suggests that had a major positive impact.

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[–] SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 7 points 4 days ago

That 16% has investments in it.

[–] Kintarian@lemmy.world 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The 16 percent represents the billionaires that stand to lose their ass if the bubble bursts

[–] Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 4 points 3 days ago

The US wouldnt be an oligarchy if 16% were billionaires.

[–] itisileclerk@lemmy.world 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

It doesn't matter what Americans think about anything. In fact, they DON'T THINK. Imagine someone thinking and deciding that any idiot can have a gun. Or someone thinking and deciding that the width of a man's thumb at the base of the nail or the length of three dry, round barley grains placed side by side is a basic unit of measurement? That's not thinking, that's idiocy.

[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 3 days ago

Yeah and everyone knows that every American must agree for a law to be valid, which is how we know that this describes every American

[–] Telorand@reddthat.com 6 points 4 days ago

Amazing. Given how much wealth the top 10% own, it's basically only the wealthiest—who have enough income to exist in a different tier of society—who think AI will have a positive impact. The other 6% must be their sycophants and shills.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

16 percent of Americans think AI will have a positive impact

Going to need this group cross-referenced with the percentage of Americans who enjoy CSAM.

[–] CatAssTrophy@safest.space 3 points 3 days ago

CSAM numbers (intentional viewers, not incidental stumbling upon it) are probably closer to 1/3-1/2 of that.

16% is the same amount that approved of Trumps stupid birthday bash, though. And the same percentage that say the economy is doing great currently. And the same as people who have invested in bitcoin. I'd expect a high rate of overlap in those 16%s.

[–] Lexam@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

I love AI. It DOes all kinds of things NOT just make pictures. TRUST me I us ai every day. THE example I like to share is how it let's me research different types of MACHINES.

[–] cyberfae@piefed.social 2 points 3 days ago

AI can have a positive impact on society, but not in it's current form. We need things that can help us make sense of large data sets, we also could use things that help automate really tedious, menial tasks. We do not need or want industrial grade slop generators.

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