Anil DashSep 25, 2025
I've been trying to find a name or descriptor for people who I think are looking at "AI" broadly and soberly, with a genuinely objective perspective and information that's not captured by the big tech companies but also fluent in the technology behind it. ( @simon would be the exemplar here.) What would you call this cohort? Because I think it's sort of a community without a name, which limits its impact.
Show threadtanteSep 25, 2025

@anildash are people ever "genuinely objective"? You probably mean some form of "lack of strong emotions towards AI" but I'd argue that that - given the real impacts and flaws of AI - creates a bit of a false middle ground.

Even though you might not see it as that I would call a lot of them the (neo-)luddites. But I feel like you are looking for something different that is a lot harder to pin down because they can't be structurally critical which kinda limits the target a lot.

I wonder how useful defining that group is though. Is there a neutral position when looking at something actively harming many of the structures defining our world?

Show threadJPSep 25, 2025
@tante @anildash yeah if someone says they're objectively non-emotionally asking Mecha Hitler something, anything really, they are going in a pretty specific bin on my social landscape
Show threadDarius KazemiSep 25, 2025

@jplebreton @tante @anildash It doesn't really have to be about Grok or whatever. I think the cohort Anil is talking about (evidenced by his mention of Simon) is one that I have a foot in myself -- for example, in my hobby time I'm working with fully local voice assistant tech that uses small LLMs at different levels of the stack, all in service of not sending recordings of my house to Amazon or Google.

"Objective" is probably the wrong word though.

Show threadAnil DashSep 27, 2025
@darius @jplebreton @tante yeah it’s an inaccurate word, but kind of gets at the semantic struggle I’m having
Show threadGlyphSep 27, 2025
@anildash @darius @jplebreton @tante “thoughtful but not emotionally dysregulated about the ‘AI’ brand”?
Show threadDarius Kazemi
@glyph @anildash @jplebreton @tante call us The Bomb Squad because we don't believe the hype
Sep 27, 2025 at 4:59amWeb
Show threadGlyphSep 27, 2025
@darius @anildash @jplebreton @tante I think I have one foot in this cohort about half of the time, I definitely have my bad days though. (I have a lot of sympathy for how some of the atproto folks obviously seem to feel about “blockchain” as a word)