If I talk to the people I know who don’t spend all their time online, they’re just not using AI. Quite a few of my close friends haven’t used AI even once in any way, and most of the rest tried it out once and didn’t really care for it. They’re busy doing things in the real world, like spending time with their kids, or riding horses, or reading books.
I talk to an acquaintance selling some homemade products on Etsy, he uses & likes the automatically generated product summary Etsy made for him. My neighbor asks me if I have any further suggestions for refinishing her table top beyond the ones ChatGPT suggested. Watching all of my coworkers using Google search, they just read the LLM summary at the top of the page and look no further. I see a friend take a picture, she uses the photo AI tool to remove a traffic sign from the background. Over lunch, a coworker tells me about the thing she learned about from the generated summary of a YouTube video.
We can take principled stands against these things, and I do because I am an obnoxiously principled dork, but the reality is it's everywhere and everyone other than us is using it.
Being busy riding horses and reading books are both niche activities (yes, reading too, sadly, at lest above a very small number of books which does not translate to people being busy doing it more than a tiny fraction of their time), which suggests perhaps your close friends are a rather biased set. Nothing wrong with that, but we're all in bubbles.
