r/DefendingAIArt

At its core, the panic is fundamentally the same:

A bunch of people getting riled up to hate a technology that they don't even remotely understand:

Repeating talking points from other people who also don't understand the technology (or do understand it, but are motivated to mislead for their own benefit), culminating in calls to destroy vital infrastructure that, again, they fundamentally don't understand -- Whether that be 5G towers, or data centres (which let's remember, do A LOT more than AI stuff. Data centres are where all cloud storage lives, including posts, photos and videos from various platforms).

AI hysteria may be more widespread (or at least, more visible), but that's only because anti-AI bias was already preloaded into our culture, allowing it to gain a foothold where the far more obscure 5G simply couldn't.

5G was also just an upgrade to a technology most people were already using, so there were far fewer unknowns to exploit. AI, meanwhile, is a fundamental paradigm shift that is utterly alien to most people, leaving more people vulnerable to fear and anger against it.

I've also encountered former anti-AI people who have admitted that, because they didn't like how AI looked aesthetically (especially in the early days), they were predisposed to listening to anti-AI voices to reinforce their initial gut reaction. This, I believe, is also a large factor in anti-AI sentiment being more widespread than anti-5G was at its peak.

Regardless, it all stems from a shared gut reaction spinning out into confirmation bias and amplified by the rampant spread of misinformation.

And yes, there is a certain irony in how widespread anti-AI narratives have become, when the spread of misinformation is one of the core fears about AI. Not an invalid one either, but it shows that we never needed AI to convince large groups of people of things that are fundamentally not true (or otherwise, misleading or reductive).