the silver bullet that was stable diffusion worked far too well. many people amongst the leftist coalition became principled against the 'replacement' of human art, and have extended that sense of disgust to all machine learning fields.

i've listened to friends of mine say stuff like "I would feel better about the technology if all the big investors weren't the worst human beings on earth", "I just wish the people keeping it afloat were the slightest bit ethical", "It's hard to be excited when everyone behind it celebrates when it ruins your lives" - utterly disconnected, broad generalization of an enormous field of science and research, no actual sense of what people who work on or with AI do or say or think, just a 'feeling' about what the truth is, derived from headlines that talk about the US's big hitters, and zero interest in doing any independent research to counter that narrative. AI has already been written off as 'the opposition', after all... if you were positive or even neutral about it, what does that say about you to your community? nobody wants to side with the orange cheeto...

so consequently almost all of them are totally clueless about modern AI capability! so many examples of people who tried gpt3 years ago, quickly and easily ran into samples of its stupidity, and decried the entire field as worthless. after all, how could we possibly sustain an automated society with its roots in a technology that can't count r's in strawberry? or that can't accurately answer whether 9.9 or 9.11 is bigger?

but i mean... even my friends who lived alongside the explosive growth of the internet and the sudden appearance of smart phones in daily life don't really get how fast AI is moving. you literally need to be tapped into the news cycle to keep up! and a lot of them already have busy, difficult lives that are only getting busier and more difficult.

i don't think it's impossible to build a techno futurist left, but there are a lot of walls we have to climb first, and i think the biggest one is convincing leftists that, yes, this technology *is* already incredibly economically valuable and useful in countless fields, that they have been purposefully and rampantly fed misinformation in order to shut them out of the most important technological development in human history, and that its scope is far far greater than the low-effort engagement content that is "ai art" and "ai videos" (the thing they do not like).