Interesting discussion on HN.
I think there is definitely some echo chambering, since the average person isn’t generally aware of AI. At the same time, mainstream media has been picking up the hype train a lot recently.
People hear my grad school studies involve AI/ML and I instantly get bombarded with questions about ChatGPT.
I was talking to a friend of my mother and she was genuinely shocked when i told her that ChatGPT sometimes just makes things up. I was a little take aback with how deeply she thanked me for telling her that she needs to double check if ChatGPT suggests something. She was just completely believing the AI output.
A friend of mine sent me some code and ask me if i can help him getting it to work. Turns out he doesn’t know any programming and just had ChatGPT generate it for him. He wanted it to do a thing for which there was no python library available so ChatGPT just hallucinated the API. It took me a while to explain to him that what he was trying to do was just not going to work but I was able to suggest him an existing software solution.
So yeah I think that the average people are not aware of it and then many people that are aware of it are overestimating the technology.
