Comic Strips

The "luddite" reaction is largely a reaction to the overhype applied by the industry that pretends the current wave of text/image generators is general intelligence and in conjunction with robotics can replace every job and allow the upper class folks to live a full life without that pesky labor class.

So it's naturally to expect a wave of such hype pretending it's unambiguously amazing and perfect to get hit with a counter that's overly dismissive and treats AI as a very bad brand. Also, in some contexts even if it is a net win, it's still kind of annoying. In my haystack example, a human would have reviewed 23 things confidently declared by the AI to be needles and said no to them. Practically speaking, that's unimaginably better than reviewing millions of not-needles to get to some needles, but we are more annoyed because in our mind the things presented were supposed to be needles. Same applies to a lot of generative AI use, it might provide a decent chunk of content that's nearly usable 20% of the time so quick as to be worth it, but it's hard to ignore the 80% of suggestions that it throws at you that are unusably bad. Depends on your job and your niche as to what the percentage will be. From a creative perspective, it generates milquetoast stuff, which may suffice for backgrounds and stuff that doesn't matter, but is a waste of time when attempted as the key creative elements.

Broadly society has to navigate the nuanced middle ground, where it can be pretty good assistive technology but not go all out on it. Except of course there are areas likely to be significantly fully automated, like customer support or food order taking (though I prefer kiosks/apps for more precise ordering through tapping my way through, but either way not a human).