The AI "well" had been so thouroughly poisoned over the last 10 years, that the average person hears AI now and equates it to the usefulness of Siri or Alexa (i.e. functionally zero). It's going to take time for society to ingest the step function change that has occured in the last year. We can actually talk to our computers now, and obviously that's going to change everything. But it may be a more subtle shift, one where the new generation just takes that for granted from here on out and we move forward with a new normal, the same as the web was for us.
Nah, most people hadn’t thought much about AI as anything other than science fiction before ChatGPT.
Non-technical people are reading the “stochastic parrot” articles, then trying a few superficial chat conversations and drawing their conclusions from that.
>What average person thinks of Siri and Alexa as AI?
They've both been marketed as such. Like it or not these are the best that big tech could provide before the LLM era. I would include Bixby in there as an also-ran as well. They would be the only interaction that anyone would have with anything resembling AI outside of the tech world.
The only place I see AI downplayed is on HN. Everywhere else in my life the "Average person" gives one of two responses: (1) They're barely even aware of the recent AI hype, or (2) It's practically magic in how amazingly good it is.
