It's less about who is right and more about economic interests and lobbying power. There's a vocal minority that is just dead set against AI using all sorts of arguments related to religion, morality, fears about mass unemployment, all sorts of doom scenarios, etc. However, this is a minority with not a lot of lobbying power ultimately. And the louder they are and the less of this stuff actually materializes the easier it becomes to dismiss a lot of the arguments. Despite the loudness of the debate, the consensus is nowhere near as broad on this as it may seem to some.

And the quality of the debate remains very low as well. Most people barely understand the issues. And that includes many journalists that are still getting hung up on the whole "hallucinations can be funny" thing mostly. There are a lot of confused people spouting nonsense on this topic.

There are special interest groups with lobbying powers. Media companies with intellectual properties, actors worried about being impersonated, etc. Those have some ability to lobby for changes. And then you have the wider public that isn't that well informed and has sort of caught on to the notion that chat gpt is now definitely a thing that is sometimes mildly useful.

And there are the AI companies that are definitely very well funded and have an enormous amount of lobbying power. They can move whole economies with their spending so they are getting relatively little push back from politicians. Political Washington and California run on obscene amounts of lobbying money. And the AI companies can provide a lot of that.

A vocal minority led to the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Nazi party and the modern climate change movement. Vocal minorities can be powerful.