People really hate AI, so why can’t they get enough?
People really hate AI, so why can’t they get enough?
人们真的很讨厌人工智能，那为什么又对它欲罢不能？
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 执行摘要
Over the summer I talked to the CEO of Springboards, a startup building an LLM that’s designed to come up with a wider variety of responses than its mainstream rivals do. At the start of the call, he said something that’s been stuck in my head since: “We often say that we’re a self-loathing AI company. We don’t know if we really like what we’re doing.” 今年夏天，我采访了 Springboards 的首席执行官，这是一家正在开发大语言模型（LLM）的初创公司，其目标是提供比主流竞品更多样化的响应。在通话开始时，他说了一句让我至今难以忘怀的话：“我们常说自己是一家‘自我厌恶’的 AI 公司。我们不知道自己是否真的喜欢正在做的事情。”
“I guess that makes me a self-loathing AI journalist,” I replied. It was a joke! I love my job. But I do not love many of the things the technology I write about has become: warped by hype, steered by zealots, inescapable. The CEO of Springboards and I are far from alone. Around the world, a love/hate attitude toward AI is very much the vibe right now. “那我想我就是一名‘自我厌恶’的 AI 记者了，”我回答道。这只是个玩笑！我热爱我的工作。但我并不喜欢我所报道的这项技术如今呈现出的许多面貌：被炒作扭曲、被狂热分子操纵，且无处不在。我和 Springboards 的首席执行官绝非个例。放眼全球，对人工智能又爱又恨的态度正是当下的主流情绪。
On the one hand, public feelings are souring fast. According to the Pew Research Center, more adults in the US think AI will have a negative impact on them personally, and on society in general, than expect a positive one. The pessimism is strongest among the young. More than half of people worldwide say that AI products and services make them nervous, according to a report from Stanford University. 一方面，公众情绪正在迅速恶化。根据皮尤研究中心（Pew Research Center）的数据，在美国，认为人工智能将对自己个人及整个社会产生负面影响的成年人，多于预期其会产生正面影响的人。这种悲观情绪在年轻人中最为强烈。斯坦福大学的一份报告显示，全球超过一半的人表示，人工智能产品和服务让他们感到不安。
In a Gallup poll in May, 71% of US adults said they would oppose construction of a new AI data center in their area, far more than the 53% who said they would oppose a new nuclear power plant. And in an NBC poll in March, AI was less popular than ICE. 在五月份的一项盖洛普民意调查中，71% 的美国成年人表示反对在他们居住的地区建设新的 AI 数据中心，这一比例远高于反对新建核电站的 53%。而在三月份的一项 NBC 民调中，人工智能的受欢迎程度甚至低于美国移民及海关执法局（ICE）。
Yet the number of people using AI is still skyrocketing. ChatGPT hit a billion monthly users in May, according to the market analysis firm Sensor Tower. Google DeepMind’s Gemini is close behind, logging 950 million users in July. According to Pew, half of US adults now say they use a chatbot, more than twice the number who said they did in 2023. One in four people say they do so every day. 然而，使用人工智能的人数仍在飙升。据市场分析公司 Sensor Tower 数据，ChatGPT 在五月份的月活跃用户达到 10 亿。Google DeepMind 的 Gemini 紧随其后，七月份录得 9.5 亿用户。据皮尤研究中心统计，现在有一半的美国成年人表示他们会使用聊天机器人，这一数字是 2023 年的两倍多。四分之一的人表示他们每天都在使用。
And it’s a global habit: More than a third of adults across all 38 OECD countries (a group of the world’s wealthiest democracies) report having used generative AI tools in the last three months. All these surveys paint a picture of two contradictory truths: A lot of people really do not like AI and a lot of people cannot get enough of it. What’s going on? 这已成为一种全球性习惯：在经合组织（OECD，全球最富裕民主国家组成的集团）的 38 个成员国中，超过三分之一的成年人报告称在过去三个月内使用过生成式 AI 工具。所有这些调查描绘出了两个矛盾的事实：许多人确实不喜欢人工智能，但许多人又对它欲罢不能。这到底是怎么回事？
It’s possible that these are two distinct groups, but I doubt it. The numbers don’t add up unless the Venn diagram is on its way to being a circle. It’s also possible that the more people use AI, the more negative their opinions about it will be. There’s at least a correlation to back this up: The Global North, where adoption is highest, skews pessimistic. In the Global South, where adoption levels are lower, people are more optimistic. 这可能是两个截然不同的群体，但我对此表示怀疑。除非维恩图（Venn diagram）正在趋向重合，否则这些数字无法解释。也有可能人们使用 AI 的次数越多，对它的看法就越负面。至少有一个相关性可以支持这一点：采用率最高的全球北方国家倾向于悲观，而在采用率较低的全球南方国家，人们则更为乐观。
But here’s what I really think is going on: When people say they hate AI it’s not the technology they dislike but, rather, the relentless drive of the companies behind it to push the tech upon us in as many ways as possible. They’re telling us to brace for the biggest social and economic upheaval in generations. How do they expect people to feel? 但我真正认为的情况是：当人们说讨厌人工智能时，他们讨厌的并不是这项技术本身，而是其背后的公司为了尽可能多地向我们推销这项技术而进行的无情驱动。他们告诉我们要为几代人以来最大的社会和经济动荡做好准备。他们指望人们会有什么感觉呢？
In many ways, we’ve been here before. We saw a similar dynamic play out with social media over the last 20 years. Billions flocked to Facebook and Twitter despite mounting techlash against the companies that ran those services. Ditto for Google search. With social media there wasn’t much anyone could do. Quitting a platform meant losing all your content and connections, giving you the choice to suck it up or start over. 在许多方面，我们以前就经历过这种情况。在过去 20 年里，我们目睹了社交媒体上演类似的动态。尽管针对运营这些服务的公司的“科技抵制”（techlash）日益高涨，但数十亿人仍涌向 Facebook 和 Twitter。谷歌搜索也是如此。对于社交媒体，人们几乎无能为力。退出一个平台意味着失去所有的内容和联系，你只能选择忍受或从头再来。
But with AI there’s still a chance for people to have some sway. There’s certainly more political appetite for regulation this time around. All 50 US states have either passed or proposed laws governing the development and deployment of AI, creating a patchwork of more than 2,100 bills across the country—a tenfold increase in three years. 但对于人工智能，人们仍有机会施加一些影响。这一次，政治上对监管的意愿显然更强。美国所有 50 个州要么已经通过，要么已经提出了管理 AI 开发和部署的法律，在全国范围内形成了 2100 多项法案的拼凑体系——三年内增长了十倍。
And with a number of top-class open-source alternatives to Google and OpenAI and Anthropic already on the market, there’s also (for now, at least) the potential for more consumer choice and the market pressure that goes with it. I don’t want to be naïve. Trillion-dollar companies are hard to move. But what comes next is not as inevitable as those companies often imply. 随着市场上已经出现了许多谷歌、OpenAI 和 Anthropic 的顶级开源替代品，（至少目前）也存在更多消费者选择的潜力，以及随之而来的市场压力。我不想表现得天真。万亿级美元的公司很难撼动。但接下来发生的事情并不像这些公司通常暗示的那样不可避免。
When I asked the Springboards CEO why his firm was developing a new model if he didn’t really like AI, he told me there was no walking back from LLMs—but you could still make them do something different. Here’s hoping we see a lot more of something different: Clarity about what AI can and cannot do and, crucially, a technology that’s not sold as if it’s about to take over the world. 当我问 Springboards 的首席执行官，如果他并不真正喜欢人工智能，为什么他的公司还要开发新模型时，他告诉我，大语言模型已经无法回头了——但你仍然可以让它们做些不同的事情。希望我们能看到更多“不同的东西”：明确人工智能能做什么和不能做什么，最重要的是，这项技术在销售时不要表现得好像它即将接管世界一样。