I don't think most people in tech are quite aware of the level of visceral AI hatred amongst non-techies. I've personally witnessed the worst Thanksgiving dinnertable fight I've ever seen (after someone revealed that their recipe was AI-generated, a couple people literally spat out the food they were enjoying and threw their plates in the trash), and a divorce (a very solid marriage between two people who were once both staunchly anti-AI unraveled within weeks after one of them changed their tune and adopted AI at work).
Spitting your food out because the AI generated the recipe is so clearly irrational that I chuckled a bit on reading that
People talk about AI getting things wrong all the time, why is it "so clearly irrational" to be doubtful of a recipe that might include ingredients that can make you sick?
Because I hope that someone who's hands were required to assemble the recipe didn't blindly add ingredients like "bleach" if the AI happened to hallucinate them.
let's take a second to think about the threat vectors here. The two obvious ones I can think of are: "AI hallucinates and tells you to put non-food into the food" and "AI hallucinates and gives you unsafe prep instructions" (e.g. "heat the chicken to an internal temperature of 110 degrees"). For both of those, it's not clear why "random recipe from an internet blog" is safer than something the AI generates. At some level if someone is preparing your food you need to trust that they know how to prepare food, no matter where they're getting their instructions from.
Because it assumes the person actually making the food has no common sense?
We had billion dollar AI company install vending machine that was giving stuff away for free, so maybe AI users don't have common sense.
If they're asking an LLM for a recipe, they don't.
People get things wrong all the time as well, so I wouldn't trust them either.
People get things wrong in a different, more observable/predictable way. Sure, we are easily tricked dummies and we can't know if a human is right or wrong, but our human-trust <i>heuristics</i> are highly developed. Our AI-trust heuristics don't exist.
Dunno about you, but I like the increased viscosity in my sauces when I use glue:<p><a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd11gzejgz4o" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd11gzejgz4o</a>
I could see being concerned about food safety; I wouldn't trust an AI recipe to tell me how long/what temperature to cook chicken, and I might not trust someone who uses AI to generate recipes to know either.
Hi! I love to cook! I also use AI to brainstorm recipes sometimes! Wanna try asking Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or even Grok what temperature chicken needs to be cooked to? I just asked Claude: 165°F (74°C) internal temperature.<p>Where does this come from?
if you ask that question alone, AI is most likely to get it right, but the usual pitfalls of AI apply; they sometimes randomly get things wrong, people are more likely to miss wrong information when it's surrounded with correct information, and LLMs are specifically good at making text that <i>seems</i> correct on the surface. and in my experience, people often use AI <i>specifically because</i> they don't have a lot of knowledge in an area. if you do already know plenty about cooking, I'm sure using AI is probably fine, I just see it as a red flag.<p>cooking is also a form of art, with a strong social aspect. using AI for it has a similar ick factor to using generative AI for pictures. I'm not saying I immediately distrust anyone using it, but I do think it's a sign that maybe the person cares a bit less about what they're doing.
Arguably, that's <i>wrong</i> - not because it's unsafe, but because it's not the best temperature for any part of the chicken I know of. I'm a big J. Kenji López-Alt and Serious Eats fan, and 165 is too hot for good chicken breast and too cool for good dark meat: <a href="https://www.seriouseats.com/chicken-thigh-temperature-technique-11887963" rel="nofollow">https://www.seriouseats.com/chicken-thigh-temperature-techni...</a>
I can't tell if you're criticizing the parent or are innocently asking how Claude knows the temperature for chicken.<p>To be clear in the case of the former: Harm data points have approximately one trillion times the weight of no-harm data points, as a rule of thumb.
Even if it can give the right answer when asked, will it necessarily account for that in a recipe it generates? A beginning cook may not know enough to ask.
Yea, I suppose that is fair regarding cook timings.
I interpret it as an expression of disgust. Similar to how people will stop reading and throw away a good book when they learn the author is a morally reprehensible person.
but was it done with GPT-5.4 xhigh with an adversarial loop?
I mostly agree that it's an overreaction. However, "irrational" is a really bad choice of word. Every non-technical person understands that sometimes AI says wrong things - like, random, crazy wrong things, not just a little off. It's just a general rule kept in the back of the mind. Food is <i>easily</i> in that realm of "be careful". Did the AI produce a recipe that would be harmful to you and the cook didn't notice? <i>Almost</i> certainly not. So, sure, they were being over-cautious. But "irrational"? No, no, no. It's definitely rational.<p>Look at what you're writing.<p>"Doing X is so clearly irrational that I chuckled a bit."<p>Please don't perpetuate the image of the elitist techie. That is what was just firebombed.
lol = if you're against AI recipes, you have bigger problems.
The very fact that your takeaway from that story was "look at how dumb my enemies are" is why this is a conflict worth worrying about.<p>Are you right? Yeah, basically. Are you going to laugh at your stupid neighbors until they burn your house down in rage? Maybe? You don't treat fear with malice.
From a recent NBC News poll, “the only topics that were less popular than AI were the Democratic Party and Iran”: <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-majority-voters-say-risks-ai-outweigh-benefits-rcna262196" rel="nofollow">https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-majority...</a>
Well, Sam Altman and Jensen Huang are going around bragging about how many people they're going to push out of employment. Might have something to do with it.
My wife runs a food blog and sometimes uses AI to come up with recipes she tests on us first. One of the best dishes she’s ever made (and one of the best I’ve ever eaten) was pork with an apricot sauce. The pork was fine, but the sauce was absolutely incredible! I’d put it on any kind of meat. Funny thing is, I don’t even like apricots, but the sauce was amazing.
My wife does have one advantage, which is that she knows when the AI has hallucinated something crazy and makes appropriate adjustments. I guess it's like anything. AI can be a big help to those who already have a threshold level of background knowledge in a field but can cause big problems for those who don't.
Politics really is a substitute for religion in America
In secular America at least. Most people in the US are religious, many of them fervently so.<p>And quite a few of them like to mix their religion with politics.
Frankly I think a lot of these people are politics first. How else do you explain the dissonance between Jesus’s teachings and their political opinions?
this is true, but thankfully, religion is declining in America. although if people are replacing it with politics, maybe we need another revival
Religious people can be anti-AI too.
Indeed, but the rage I've seen during political fights at family gatherings (and another politics-induced divorce) pales in comparison to the rage I saw in these two anecdotes. The worst political debates I've seen involved raised voices and some name calling, not spitting food and smashing plates. The only other political divorce I've seen slowly simmered over a few years after Trump was first elected, not in a literal matter of weeks.
The remarkable part of your anecdote is the behavior. Seems to me some humans nowadays are less tolerant of any difference in opinion, AI is just the current reason to pick a fight.<p>Wonder why that is, and if we'll grow out of it peacefully.
There is very strong anti-AI sentiment among "techies" too. It's just not absolute or generalized (AI is a huge umbrella term).
You might call me a "techie" and I both use AI and have very strong anti-AI sentiment. I don't think this is a contradiction, because I believe while the technology itself is not bad, the way that people use it definitely is.<p>People trust AI outputs in ways they should not. They don't understand its sycophantic design and succumb to AI psychosis. They deploy it in antisocial ways, for war, or spam, or scams. They use it to justify layoffs. They use it as a justification to gobble up public funds. They use it to power their winner-take-all late-stage capitalism economy. It goes on and on.
I agree completely. The way it's marketed and used is a big part of my distaste, the other part is big tech / AI companies and their actions and ethics. It's why I'm a huge supporter of open source and locally run models, and I am moving most of my workflow to things that I can run on my own machine, or at least on a GPU that I can rent from a plethora of providers.
I must live in the upside down. If there are any ardent anti-AI people I come across they're techies. Whereas non-techies are either oblivious or completely and comically locked-in as caricatured in that South Park episode.
This was obviously a fictional thanksgiving dinner. Nobody is this geezed up about AI assistance.
I would absolutely stop eating a meal if I learned AI was involved in creating it. I suppose I wouldn't literally spit it out but I wouldn't take another bite.
Nobody in your circle of friends/acquaintances perhaps.
> a couple people literally spat out the food they were enjoying and threw their plates in the trash<p>That was an unnecessarily extreme reaction, like AI 3d printed the ingredients.
From my own perspective, the "visceral hatred" isn't so much at AI (which I use almost exclusively to generate funny pictures of myself and coworkers) but at the executives that view it as a way to enshittify society.<p>turning myself (an overweight bearded guy) into an animated hula dancer and turning my coworker into the Terminator and sinking into molten steel don't seem to inspire the same hatred. unless you don't like hula dancers.
Not just non-techies. Plenty of techies share that same visceral hatred. Some of them even use these tools themselves, because it’s a complicated issue with nuances.
I've found that most non-tech people are indifferent or, at worst, utterly bored by any mention of AI.<p>The tech people are the ones that have the strongest opinions one way or the other.
It's quite prevalent in tech too-- however, folks tend to be quiet because the "use AI for everything or else" hammer is being used across the industry.
Surely there must have been underlying tensions in that marriage.<p>(I don't feel at all confident in that statement; I am requesting reassurance.)
> after someone revealed that their recipe was AI-generated, a couple people literally spat out the food they were enjoying and threw their plates in the trash<p>Not entirely unwarranted given the track record of LLMs as a chef though:<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/10/pak-n-save-savey-meal-bot-ai-app-malfunction-recipes" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/10/pak-n-save-sav...</a><p><a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd11gzejgz4o" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd11gzejgz4o</a><p>Of course it was two years ago and it's unlikely to happen again, but that's the drawback of the “move fast and break things” attitude: sometimes you've broken <i>public perception</i> and it's hard to fix afterwards.
Crypto doesn't get that much hatred, since you don't need to participate in the space even in non-techies circles. But it doesn't affect them and it can be safely ignored in its own bubble.<p>Mentioning "AI" in non-techies circles is a bad idea. It tells you that many here are in a massive bubble and unaware of the visceral hate against AI because it directly affects them and they <i>cannot</i> opt-out.<p>Given that AI takes more than it gives back (jobs, energy, water, houses) of course you will get anti-AI activists.
Most SV people live in a bubble inside of a bubble. They don’t understand how their words come across to a significant portion of the population. If they did they would shut the fuck up.