It's clearly going to take the tech industry a while to understand that the "AI" brand is well and truly toxic
If you have a software or feature, sell it on what it does for people. If it's actually useful, then calling it "AI" will just make people assume it's yet another money-grabbing con.
Especially if you aren't using an LLM or diffusion model and instead are just using a non-generative ML model. Why willingly adopt all that negative baggage when you don't have to?
"It's clearly going to take the tech industry a while"
It really shouldn't, though. We have plenty of studies and other evidence.
https://stefanbohacek.com/blog/on-generative-ai/#consumer-sentiment
I wonder if this is denial, or maybe they just don't care?
"we might be in a fairly loud echo chamber"
To some degree, yes. But look at the studies and surveys listed in the blog post that I shared. Seems like the general public is very much not onboard?
It is also fascinating to see the response to Bluesky announcing their AI-powered feed builder tool, not sure if you saw that:
@ramsey First of all, are you using the 43 million accounts figure that sometimes gets tossed around?
Doesn't seem accurate.
https://bsky.app/profile/mackuba.eu/post/3mhg7zdpgsk2r
But okay, that's still only 0.4%.
If we look at the number of accounts that have been active over the past day*, it jumps to 10%.
I'm guessing that's still too low for you, but Bluesky itself is an echo chamber, it's a very self-selected group.
What issues do you have with the sources I listed in my article, that should be more representative of a more general audience?
I've done a full scan through all PDSes seen on bsky.network (listHosts and then listRepos everywhere), and I got such numbers: active: 39,207,881 (= meaning: repo is visible) deactivated: 427,544 taken down: 2,564,669 total: 42,200,094 so around ~1M would probably have been deleted. [contains quote post or other embedded content]
Alright, first, apologies to you, @baldur, let me know if you want to be taken off the conversation, hate to keep polluting your mentions.
Second, @ramsey, let me step back a bit.
In my original reply, I argued that general public is turning against LLMs.
https://stefanbohacek.online/@stefan/116321006190065141
You replied that "our peers in the industry have embraced and adopted AI".
Sure, but with not a lot of trust?
"Only 33% of developers trust AI accuracy in 2025, down from 43% in 2024 and 42% in 2023. AI favorability dropped from 77% in 2023 to 72% in 2024 to just 60% this year."
But why is that relevant? I was talking about general population, now we're discussing developers and users of Bluesky, very narrow, self-selected groups.
@[email protected] "It's clearly going to take the tech industry a while" It really shouldn't, though. We have plenty of studies and other evidence. https://stefanbohacek.com/blog/on-generative-ai/#consumer-sentiment I wonder if this is denial, or maybe they just don't care?
@stefan @baldur “But why is that relevant? I was talking about general population, now we're discussing developers and users of Bluesky, very narrow, self-selected groups.”
That’s fair. I went too narrow mentioning developers, and then you mentioned reaction on Bluesky, which is why I was discussing it.
Baldur Bjarnason
Stefan Bohacek
Ben Ramsey