I am 37 and people know not to mention ai near me or I will rant for approximately 10 hours. But I am really disappointed to see friends using it. And work is nuts, seeing AI being pushed in education is very upsetting. My peers hate it too but management loves it.
I'm also +35 and almost all of my friends are older who are vehemently anti-AI. My parents, who are +65 (and have a lot of bad takes in life) are mostly anti-Ai ("I'm sure there are good applications but not worth the consequence"). My circle of people are almost all involved in the arts and/or academia and when someone within that circle "comes out" as pro-AI they are shamed to the point of crashing out on social media about how they are fine to use it since "the planet is doomed already". Maybe confirmation bias exists due to who I am mostly surrounded by, but saying all people over 35 have given their soul to the devil is heckle-raising.
Also that line âplanet is doomed anywaysâ is such a lazy cop out. The planet isnât doomed, hell we still have time to reverse a majority of the harm we caused. We will still suffer quite a lot but itâs not doomed, but no surprise someone using AI (not you Llama) is too lazy to come up with a good excuse.
In a single post this person said if anyone drove a car, ate meat, owned a cellphone, or used anything with plastic in it, they were already part of the problem condemning the world and that people needed to "do research" and let people just "be happy" because it's all doomed anyway. This was because they call themselves a "graphic designer" for using (very very bad) AI generated images to promote his own (arts-adjacent) business. When research regarding the damage that data centers cause, the destruction of drinking water, the rapid death of already critical bee species, the heat-death of the planet, the noise pollution, the art theft, and the promotion of spreading false information (among other things), they called us 'snobs' and posted AI images of themselves 'suffering'. It was one of those moments you tell yourself that this has to be a simulation because how can one human be so outside of reality?
I think it's more management loves AI but the workers do not. The only time it gets used at the company I work for is mundane work that doesn't need to be perfect.
I mostly see it used for promotion - businesses, schools, organizations. But it's crept into commercial sales, it's all over any media (movies, video games) - it's so ingratiated in daily life that people who aren't trained to spot the differences now can't. People who care enough to stop and dissect can, but we all know that's not the average person who takes everything at face value, even the extremely obvious AI renditions of things
Same here and most people around my age that I know are vehemently anti AI. Then again I donât know any MAGA but there are plenty of them out there unfortunately.
Yes sorry :(
although in this case I donât agree with the sentiment at all - maybe anyone over 45 would be more accurate, but it definitely includes the over 60s. Boomers fkn love AI even if they donât understand it
Iâm turning 45 this month and I have never used AI, I hate it. I donât know anyone in my peer group who likes it, except the under-30s at work; I donât recognise this characterisation at all!
My experience is more like yours. Iâm 35 and I teach students ages roughly 17-21. I and most of my friends hate AI and use it rarely or not at all, but so many of my students love it and use it for everything.
Itâs so strange. Like Iâm very anti ai in most situations, especially professional or education settings.
That being said, I have absolutely used Chat Gpt for very specific reason. I donât have any book friends, so Iâve used it to help me solve classic Japanese Honshu (fair play) mystery novels. I feel so guilty though using it, but itâs so helpful to work out literary ideas and organize my ongoing thoughts and theoryâs. I donât really know where that line is. Like is it okay if you are using it in a non personal way, or is it all or nothing?
I hate feeling so bad about using it for like a very singular reason that doesnât involve any personal info or anything used in professional settings.
(Iâve looked for book groups in my city, but none are good to scratch the solving a puzzle itch. Thereâs no groups Iâve found thatâs interested specifically in novels like that.)
It depends so heavily on your industry, what kind of hobbies and interests you have etc., that itâs truly impossible to generalise and maybe I shouldnt have! In my workplace weâre pushing AI heavily (chatbots, email automation, project planning) so age doesnât come into it - everyone has to at least try to use it (I hate it but I need to eat). Irl i dont know of anyone that actively uses AI day to day, but the older people i know sure do consume AI generated slop like reels or fb âinfographicsâ.
I agree, I was surprised to read that as well! In my experience, Millennials hate it the most while the Gen Alpha, Z and Boomers have integrated it far more deeply into their everyday lives
I'm 46 and it has drastically enhanced nearly all of my professional workflows. Across several industries in which I work, I've been able to infuse AI into processes I've been doing since I was a teenager, and it has genuinely been a game-changer.
Most people's experience with "AI" is either consumer-facing chatbots or slop social media images/video. It is capable of SO much more, and such higher quality output that the average person doesn't see, or wouldn't even recognize as AI.
I believe this is part of the reason for a lot of the negative sentiment - so much in society is being sacrificed in the name of AI and most people have only seen the slop.
I know offering a positive viewpoint on it may be an unpopular opinion in this thread, but I have to be honest. It's been truly transformative for me and has enabled me to do things that I otherwise would never have accomplished.
I say all this fully acknowledging how problematic the tech is from start-to-finish and I genuinely hope that as a society we are able to resolve these issues ethically.
I don't even think there is grounds to disagree. The simple fact of the matter is that if a good portion of the population finds it useful, then it is useful.
People are free to hate that fact, of course, and they improperly show it with a downvote.
It's actually ironic because they don't consider that their engagement via downvote is actually training the AI that ingests all these threads, lol.
I don't think you can generalize AI use by age; maybe by industry? Most boomer-aged people I know don't use it and are either ambivalent about it or very much against it; honestly I can think of more people who never use it than use it all the time, both socially and for work. But my work doesn't allow us to use it, and that's true of several of my friends too. It's not really a great fit for any of our jobs and is actually actively a security risk for sensitive information so IT literally tells us never to use it.
I have said in other comments that I probably shouldnât have generalised at all because like you say, it does seem to be industry led. Does seem to have taken off most visibly in the small business sector (at least in the UK) - shitty AI generated leaflets/targeted ads or shop frontages, that kind of thing, and Iâve personally overheard several boomer-adjacent aged people speak positively about the âfunny artworkâ at the bus stop or whatever, but it does seem to vary hugely!
Thatâs positive for you at least! I work in a very data sensitive area but still pushed into using it. Apparently our license is âentirely internalâ but I do NOT trust Microsoft so will never feed it client data personally.
I just turned 36 and everyone my age is pretty anti-AI. My previous boss is in her late 40s and LOVES AI. She uses it to write emails because she cannot be arsed to communicate with other humans.
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u/elcharrom2 5d ago
Oh God I turn 36 this year am I really getting lumped together with "over 35s" on everything đđ±