Making sense of the debate over AI psychosis
Making sense of the debate over AI psychosis
解读关于“AI精神错乱”的争论
Box founder Aaron Levie got us talking this week with a social media post suggesting that tech CEOs are “uniquely prone to AI psychosis.” On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I did our best to unpack Levie’s comment. For one thing, we noted that he isn’t disavowing AI tools, merely insisting that CEOs need to actually use those tools to understand them. That’s a relatively gentle note of skepticism compared to other signs of a broader backlash, whether you look at graduating college students booing any mention of AI, the bad vibes around tech industry layoffs, or the apparent surge of installs at search engine DuckDuckGo after Google’s announcement that it’s bringing more AI to the search experience.
本周，Box 创始人 Aaron Levie 在社交媒体上发文称科技公司 CEO 们“极易患上 AI 精神错乱”，引发了我们的讨论。在 TechCrunch 的《Equity》播客最新一期节目中，Kirsten Korosec、Sean O’Kane 和我尽力剖析了 Levie 的观点。首先，我们注意到他并非在否定 AI 工具，只是坚持认为 CEO 们需要真正使用这些工具才能理解它们。与更广泛的抵制迹象相比，这只是一种相对温和的怀疑态度——无论是大学毕业生对任何提及 AI 的言论发出嘘声，科技行业裁员带来的负面情绪，还是在谷歌宣布将 AI 引入搜索体验后 DuckDuckGo 安装量的明显激增，都显示出这种抵制情绪的存在。
Kirsten suggested that Google faces a dilemma where it’s “chasing that thing it feels like it has to do to keep up, but it’s messing with the thing that people attach to the brand the most, and it’s not improving it.” More broadly, she wondered “if this anti-AI moment is an opportunity for startups or other areas of business.” Keep reading for a preview of our conversations, edited for length and clarity.
Kirsten 指出，谷歌正面临一个两难境地：它“为了跟上步伐而追逐它认为必须做的事情，但这却破坏了人们对该品牌最核心的认知，而且并没有带来实质性的改进。”更广泛地说，她想知道“这种反 AI 的时刻是否为初创公司或其他商业领域提供了机会。”以下是我们对话的节选，为简洁明了起见，内容经过了编辑。
Anthony Ha: AI is incredibly polarizing. And that’s part of what’s challenging to talk about, you can feel a little crazy because [simultaneously,] everybody’s using it and everybody loves it, but also no one’s using it and everybody hates it at the same time. There are large contingents for whom both of those things are true. On the user side, one thing that was very striking, we [already] talked about Google’s announcements about search and how AI is becoming a bigger part of search — although it’s been interesting to see how Google has tried to walk that back a little bit, or at least add some nuance in terms of, if you want that 10 blue links experience, there are still ways you can get it. It’s not going away entirely. But I think a lot of people are not excited about the direction Google is going in. And so you see, for example, that DuckDuckGo said installs are up 30%, which is a huge leap. Now, of course, DuckDuckGo is a much, much smaller product than Google. I don’t think Google is in any immediate trouble, but I think that’s a sign that there is a very significant audience that does not like the current AI direction.
Anthony Ha： AI 极具争议性。这也是讨论它为何困难的原因之一，你会感到有点疯狂，因为（同时）每个人都在使用它且热爱它，但与此同时，又没人使用它且每个人都讨厌它。这两类人群的规模都非常庞大。在用户端，有一点非常引人注目，我们（已经）讨论过谷歌关于搜索的公告以及 AI 如何在搜索中占据越来越大的比重——尽管有趣的是，谷歌试图对此进行一些回调，或者至少增加了一些细微差别，即如果你想要那种“10 个蓝色链接”的传统体验，仍然有办法获得。它并没有完全消失。但我认为很多人对谷歌的发展方向并不感到兴奋。因此，你可以看到，例如 DuckDuckGo 表示其安装量增长了 30%，这是一个巨大的飞跃。当然，DuckDuckGo 的产品规模比谷歌小得多。我不认为谷歌目前面临任何直接的危机，但我认为这表明有一个非常庞大的用户群体不喜欢当前的 AI 发展方向。
Sean O’Kane: I will say one thing that I keep looking for when I look at all of these leading AI labs or tech companies that are really pushing AI features and products — to me, there seems to just be this collapsing towards Anthropic’s approach, this idea of really trying to understand what it is you want to offer people and sticking to that. And Google is one of the ones that I would say is actually still pushing the other direction. They’re trying to do a lot of different things, but they don’t do themselves any favors by being so vague about it. What I mean by that is, when Google goes on stage at IO and talks about the way that it thinks it’s going to change search, so much of what they’re talking about, they’re talking about shopping or stuff that ends in a commercial transaction. And I think so much of what we think of Google as collectively, especially people who have been using it for two or three decades, is as an information retrieval system. Google can struggle with that a lot, where they get reactive fears of how they may be damaging the information retrieval side of things, and their response is, “Yeah, but that’ll still be there. Let’s focus on how it’s going to help you book a flight or something like that.” And then they also go off and sort of shoot themselves in the foot by releasing — it must be very challenging to stress test these systems, but they go out and they release this stuff and they’re running into the same problems they’ve run into for years.
Sean O’Kane： 我想说一点，当我观察所有这些真正推动 AI 功能和产品的领先 AI 实验室或科技公司时，我一直在寻找的东西是——对我来说，似乎大家都趋向于 Anthropic 的方法，即真正试图理解你想提供给人们什么，并坚持这一点。而谷歌是我认为实际上仍在朝相反方向努力的公司之一。他们试图做很多不同的事情，但他们对这些事情的模糊态度并没有给自己带来任何好处。我的意思是，当谷歌在 IO 大会上谈论它认为将如何改变搜索时，他们谈论的很多内容都是关于购物或以商业交易结束的事情。我认为我们作为一个整体对谷歌的认知，特别是那些已经使用它两三十年的人，它是一个信息检索系统。谷歌在这方面经常感到挣扎，他们会产生一种反应性的恐惧，担心自己可能正在损害信息检索功能，而他们的回应是：“是的，但那个功能还在。让我们专注于它如何帮你预订航班之类的东西。”然后他们又通过发布产品来搬起石头砸自己的脚——对这些系统进行压力测试一定非常困难，但他们发布了这些东西，结果却遇到了他们多年来一直遇到的同样问题。
Kirsten Korosec: We had a great article that just published about how Google doesn’t know how to spell its own name. If you ask it, “How many P’s are in Google?” it says two. It’s this tension between: Google is chasing that thing it feels like it has to do to keep up, but it’s messing with the thing that people attach to the brand the most, and it’s not improving it. What I’m wondering is, we’ve already seen some early evidence of people’s fingers doing the voting or walking for them, by literally going to another service. But I wonder if there are opportunities for other startups out there or culturally speaking, if this anti-AI moment is an opportunity for startups or other areas of business that we haven’t really thought about.
Kirsten Korosec： 我们刚刚发表了一篇很棒的文章，讲的是谷歌甚至不知道如何拼写自己的名字。如果你问它：“Google 里有几个 P？”它会回答两个。这就是一种张力：谷歌正在追逐它认为必须做的事情以保持竞争力，但这却破坏了人们对该品牌最核心的认知，而且并没有带来改进。我感到好奇的是，我们已经看到了一些早期证据，人们正用脚投票，直接转向了其他服务。但我不知道这对其他初创公司是否有机会，或者从文化层面来看，这种反 AI 的时刻是否为我们尚未真正考虑过的初创公司或其他商业领域提供了机会。
Anthony: Absolutely. Again, it’s probably a challenge because there is such a range of opinions. And if you build something that’s tailored for a group that’s skeptical [of] AI, then you’re probably going to alienate other users who are much more evangelistic or gung-ho about it. But I think that’s just the moment we’re living in. And you can see in how DuckDuckGo is promoting itself, that they’re very much emphasizing this idea of being anti-AI, which I find very striking because I’ve mentioned before, [I’ve been] moving away from Google myself, trying out other search engines. And I would say that a year ago, when I started that exploration, even these alternative search engines were still trying to experiment with AI features, emphasizing AI to some degree because they also thought they had to do it. And now I think they’re seeing that there is actually a lane to be like, “No, we just were not interested in that stuff at all. Or inasmuch as we’re doing it, we’re very much putting it in a separate sandbox that’s not going to affect your core search experience.”
Anthony： 当然。再说一次，这可能是一个挑战，因为人们的观点差异很大。如果你构建的东西是为那些对 AI 持怀疑态度的群体量身定制的，那么你可能会疏远那些对 AI 更热衷或更积极的其他用户。但我认为这就是我们所处的时代。你可以从 DuckDuckGo 的自我宣传方式中看出，他们非常强调“反 AI”的理念，这让我觉得非常引人注目，因为正如我之前提到的，我自己也正在远离谷歌，尝试其他搜索引擎。我想说的是，一年前当我开始这种探索时，即使是这些替代搜索引擎也仍在尝试 AI 功能，并在某种程度上强调 AI，因为他们也认为自己必须这样做。而现在我认为他们意识到，实际上有一条路可以走，那就是：“不，我们根本对那些东西不感兴趣。或者即使我们做了，我们也把它放在一个独立的沙盒中，不会影响你的核心搜索体验。”
Kirsten: I think we unfairly sometimes categorize all the tech CEOs as force-feeding people AI. And there’s at least one tech CEO who has come out and said, “I think that there’s a little bit of psychosis among other tech CEOs around AI.” I’m talking about Box founder Aaron Levie, who has come to Disrupt many times and is a friend of TechCrunch.
Kirsten： 我认为我们有时不公平地将所有科技公司 CEO 都归类为强迫人们接受 AI 的人。至少有一位科技公司 CEO 站出来说：“我认为其他科技公司 CEO 在 AI 问题上确实有点精神错乱。”我指的就是 Box 创始人 Aaron Levie，他曾多次参加 Disrupt 大会，也是 TechCrunch 的朋友。