I'm not sure people fully comprehend the trickle-down pop-culture/zeitgeist effects that LLM's are having/are going to have on humanity.
Because everyone now outsources much of their thinking and researching to LLM's, our collective culture + brain is shaped in a cyclical manner by using them.
It's the mechanical homogenization of culture and groupthink.
Is that really accurate though? I use Claude in my software job but the majority of my friends do not use it at all. And I never use it for anything other than that either.
TBH I don’t find it useful at all for personal use. It’s totally soulless for creative ventures and absolute dogshit at researching the things I want it to be good at (I.e. planning a vacation or finding new music).
All that combined with the social stigma makes me feel pretty skeptical that it’s some kind of pop culture shaping mechanism, at least not for a few more years.
We're all in our own personal bubbles and extrapolating from there as normal, but ChatGPT has some 800 million users, most of them outside the US. Countries like the Philippines and Thailand. I don't think they're all vibecoding the hottest new SaaS app but maybe they are.
Even the Philippines and Thailand are lower in per-capita usage compared to the US, most of the higher use are in Europe. Interestingly Australia & New Zealand are also pretty high, similar to Europe and far more than Asia & Africa in general, with the exception being Saudi Arabia (similar to US) and Israel (even higher than Australia). https://openai.com/signals/data
+1 to this. Many of my engineer friends don’t use AI even in cases where it could clearly help them. Not out of any principles stance but because they just don’t understand that it could speed up their work. It doesn’t help that the advertising surrounding AI hasn’t communicated its benefits well - either you’ve tried it and you get it or you just don’t know. I would imagine some early horseback riders in the 20th century probably felt similarly about the automobile.
Because everyone now outsources much of their thinking and researching to LLM's, our collective culture + brain is shaped in a cyclical manner by using them.
It's the mechanical homogenization of culture and groupthink.