Incorrect. Previously at least some lip service consideration to public benefit was given.
Television, for example, had many FCC regulations at its inception to ensure it served in the public interest. This of course devolved over time into nomimal compliance like showing community bulletins at 5am when no one was watching.
You might be somewhat correct with the release of the Internet upon the public in the early 90's, but imagine if common carrier rules were not in effect for the phone lines everyone was using to access the Internet back then. The phone companies would have loved to collect the per-minute charges AOL initially was doing before they went to unlimited. They already had a data solution in place - ISDN - but it was substantially more expensive from what I understand and targeted to business only.
With AI, it's the complete opposite, everything is full steam ahead and the government seems to be giving it its full blessing.
>Previously at least some lip service consideration to public benefit was given
The public benefit here is that all sorts of "compliance" is made cheaper. I can see it already in the construction industry. Stuff you used to hire a firm for you use cheap labor for, they use AI, you have your "one old guy who's engineering license is kept up to date" check it, it gets some tweaks then passes his scrutiny. He submits it. Town approves it because it's legitimately right. High fives all around, three people just did something that used to take a much bigger team. The engineer would have had to decline that job before. The contractor too.
Of course, this all comes at the expense of whoever benefitted from having that barrier there in the first place.
Sure, the automobile wiped out the horse and buggy industry. The difference is that the average person’s quality of life vastly improved as a result.
Most genAI has been laughably poor at doing what it’s advertised at doing for the average person. People didn’t ask and don’t need a shoddy summary of their text notifications and they don’t want AI to take away their creative hobbies.
People didn't ask for online shopping or computers in their pockets, and both of them started out as novelties. Many people thought they were overpromised fads.
It's fine if genAI looks like the Palm Pilot today. Nothing says it will stay that way.
And if it does, opinions may change. But right now it doesn’t and that’s what we are talking about.
We saw rapid improvements in image and video generation but that’s actually proven to be super threatening to people, if not just embarrassing (see the Star Wars alien animal tech demo).
After three years of this, most genAI is crap, it has made most services worse and people very understandably don’t like it.
Where is the Siri that actually does what Apple announced back in 2024?
Women and girls are being forced to endure porn being made of them. The bosses are saying that AI is going to replace the large majority of the workforce. The bosses are saying that efforts to regulate this technology are problems that should be resisted with vigor, lest we "lose" to foreign adversaries. I am being advertised products that suggest that I replace the joyful interactions that I have with my family with interactions mediated by AI tools.
