New Research Shows Tech Community has Extremely Polarized Thoughts About AI and Its Implications
Researchers from the University of Rochester led by Jiebo Luo, a professor of computer science and the Albert Arendt Hopeman Professor of Engineering used ChatGPT to analyze a discourse of the tech community and general public about generative AI on Reddit. There were 33,912 comments on 388 subreddits that were analyzed to know how much difference there is in the thoughts of the tech community and general public when it comes to AI.
The analysis found that the general public thinks about AI as something positive, while the tech community has either strongly positive thoughts or strongly negative thoughts about AI. This all comes down to how much personal knowledge one has about the subject. Tech community belongs to different tech areas of life which creates polarization. For instance, Geoffrey Hinton who is a deep learning expert has negative views about AI while the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, thinks of AI as something extremely positive.
On the other hand, the non-tech general audience is more worried about the societal impact of AI, like the decrease in jobs and stuff like that. The tech community has more strong discussions about some focused topics and the positive things they say about AI is that it can increase productivity and they are liking the open source culture with the development of Llama.
But on the negative side, the tech community is worried about the ethical implications of AI and how AI can affect regulation of data due to hallucinations. The study says that it is important to address the fears of the general public and the policy makers and developers should explain AI technologies and its applications to people so they can understand it more easily.
Image: DIW-Aigen
