Also appeal to investors. Nobody would give tons of money to upstart which goal is to generate text porn, generated TikTok slop and make some needy teens suicide just to compete with Google Ads.

Selling big AGI dream that will literally make winner take it all is much more desirable.

The current dynamic IS based on the new gestapo thinking they're "rising up and overthrowing a violent government", due to a propaganda bubble thirty years in the making. Where do you think "ICE" is getting all of these new recruits from? The red state militias that have been seething about the slow creep of bureaucratic authoritarianism, now deputized and told they get to use their weapons to attack the other tribe. Which is also why said militias are silent now that it's actually time to defend our country from fascists - they are the fascists. Propaganda is a hell of a drug.

Hatred of AI won’t stop others from steamrolling them and their jobs using AI.

At this point, I have stopped hoping that LLMs will become vaporware.

How do you reconcile this with:

1. The absolute explosion of AI usage (revealed preferences)

2. The polling on AI, which is mixed and reveals lots of pessimism and fear among a slight majority of Americans, but hardly universal “utter hatred”.

My guess is some combo of: your family is not representative, the hatred was not as universal as it appeared (bandwagon effect), or your own hatred of AI caused you to focus on the like-minded opinions shared and ignore any contrary evidence.

> They introduced a new lower tier price with ads that if you were an existing customer, you were none the wiser.

You're right that I didn't experience them myself, but my data here are (1) Netflix evidently getting a lot of takers and making a lot of money from people using this new with ads tier, and (2) the lack of any sustained negative outcry against Netflix after the first news cycle or two.

So I'm intending to rely on that rather than my own experience. OpenAI has any number of permutations of ways to include ads, including a Netflix style cheaper paid tier, so I don't necessarily think a distinction holds on that basis, though you may be right in the end: it's more intuitive to think OpenAI would put them in the free version. Though it's possible the Netflix example is teachable in this case regardless.

And then increased prices so that the ad-based one is close to what the ad-free one was 2 years earlier.

But yeah, they didn't migrate existing customers and kept the no-ads option. Those are relevant.

>In the case of LLMs, we have service that are aiming to replace both the browser and the search engine

Most people already experience the internet as an integrated browser+search engine (and often, OS) experience from a single advertising company, Google, and it has been this way for over a decade.

>And the result is: ad-infused, tweaked to align with investor priorities, censored by the current politics of wherever the company is based service machinery that's constantly extracting personal information so it can learn better ways to refocus its priorities.

Exactly.

This is not to say I like this outcome, but how is it not massive hyperbole to invoke apocalyptic sci-fi? I expect we'll plod along much as before: some people fiercely guarding their personal info, some people taking a "privacy is dead anyway" approach, most people seeing personal computers as a means to some particular ends (scrolling social feeds and watching Netflix) that are incompatible with thinking too hard about the privacy and information environment implications.