[23666] in Privacy_Forum
[ PRIVACY Forum ] Script of my national radio report yesterday on
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lauren Weinstein)
Tue May 26 12:12:08 2026
Date: Tue, 26 May 2026 09:00:28 -0700
From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com>
To: privacy-dist@vortex.com
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This is the script of my national radio report yesterday about
speakers boosting AI being booed at commencement ceremonies, and what
this means about public reactions to AI. As always, there may have
been some minor wording variations from this script as I presented
this report live on air.
- - -
Yeah, so this is quite an intriguing turn of events. I recently
started seeing videos of various school commencement ceremonies over
the last couple of weeks or so, where the guest speakers were involved
in Big Tech one way or another. And when these speakers began to exude
praise for AI -- "AI is your future, it'll be a world of wonder and
plenty" and so on -- these speakers got loudly booed by the students,
in some cases it sounded like they'd almost be booed off the stage.
One of these speakers was former Google CEO and Executive chairman
Eric Schmidt. You can find these videos online.
And what was so telling is that you could see from speaker reactions
that these speakers seemed genuinely baffled and surprised that this
was happening and just couldn't seem to understand why young people
might feel this way. In some cases the speakers tried to talk over the
booing or say things like "just deal with it", "get used to it", and
so on. In general these speakers seemed utterly disconnected from the
real world of how ordinary people feel about the AI that is disrupting
their lives, ruining rural areas with polluting data centers, and
destroying their jobs and livelihoods.
We see ever more evidence that the backlash against Large Language
Model AI systems is growing ever more massive, as protests cut across
political and age-related lines. Loathing of AI is fairly similar
irrespective of political party. Even among younger people who had
tended to be more accepting of AI, the reality that AI is decimating
the entry level job markets that they would depend on after graduation
is causing increasing angst there as well.
Here's just a few stats for examples. A recent Gallup poll says only
18% of people between ages 14 and 29 are hopeful about AI. A new
Economist/YouGov poll says over 70% of Americans think AI is advancing
too quickly, that's 77% of Democrats and 68% of Republicans. No wonder
that if you stand at a commencement podium and wax poetic about AI,
you can expect to be facing an onslaught of boos and jeers. When it
comes to recognizing the increasing damage that this kind of AI is
doing to society, most people are already ahead of the curve. They
know that AI chatbots have reportedly been involved in murders and
suicides, can be prompted to provide dangerous information about
biological and other weapons that could be used to help plan mass
casualty events -- and that the AI firms continue to try disclaim
responsibility for the damages their AI systems are doing.
And it's getting worse. A few days ago Google proudly announced what
they call the biggest change in their familiar main Search page in
over 25 years. It's "completely reimagined with AI" they proclaimed,
and already users are seeing the devastating negative impacts. Instead
of getting traditional reliable search results or even the more recent
version with frequently misleading or just plain incorrect AI
Overviews at the top of results, Google will now attempt to funnel you
deeply into their Gemini AI system when you make ordinary queries,
trying to get you into a discussion with Gemini where a cascade of AI
hallucinations and misinformation may be presented to you in
preference to the search results we've long expected and relied upon.
In essence, in one big push to their production servers, Google has
transformed the most reliable search site on the planet into a spewing
firehose of misleading and misinformation laden AI Slop. Users
(including myself) immediately started noticing all manner of not just
incorrect, but in many cases simply lying and bizarre statements being
returned from the Google search AI system in response to simple,
ordinary search queries. It would almost be funny if it actually
weren't so serious.
Until the Big Tech AI firms and their Billionaire CEOs are made fully
responsible for the damages to society being done by their AI systems,
the unfortunate reality is that we probably can expect to see these
situations continuing to get worse and worse. With so much big money
and political gamesmanship deeply threaded into the AI hype machine,
this is another one of those cases where I definitely wouldn't
recommend holding your breath hoping for real improvements, at least
anytime in the immediate future.
- - -
L
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren@vortex.com (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Signal: By request on need to know basis
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
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