taking a couple steps back and looking at bigger picture, something that you might have never done in your entire life guessing by tone of your post, people want to automate things that they don't want to do. nobody wants to make elaborate spam that will evade detection, but if you can automate it somebody will use it this way. this is why spam, ads, certain kinds of propaganda and deepfakes are one of big actual use cases of genai that likely won't go away (isn't future bright?)
this is tied to another point. if a thing requires some level of skill to make, then naturally there are some restraints. in pre-slopnami times, making a deepfake useful in black propaganda would require co-conspirator that has both ability to do that and correct political slant, and will shut up about it, and will have good enough opsec to not leak it unintentionally. maybe more than one. now, making sorta-convincing deepfakes requires involving less people. this also includes things like nonconsensual porn, for which there are less barriers now due to genai
then, again people automate things they don't want to do. there are people that do like coding. then also there are Idea Men butchering codebases trying to vibecode, while they don't want to and have no inclination for or understanding of coding and what it takes, and what should result look like. it might be not a coincidence that llms mostly charmed managerial class, which resulted in them pushing chatbots to automate away things they don't like or understand and likely have to pay people money for, all while chatbot will never say such sacrilegious things like "no" or "your idea is physically impossible" or "there is no reason for any of this". people who don't like coding, vibecode. people who don't like painting, generate images. people who don't like understanding things, cram text through chatbots to summarize them. maybe you don't see a problem with this, but it's entirely a you problem
this leads to three further points. chatbots allow for low low price of selling your thoughts to saltman &co offloading all your "thinking" to them. this makes cheating in some cases exceedingly easy, something that schools have to adjust to, while destroying any ability to learn for students that use them this way. another thing is that in production chatbots are virtual dumbasses that never learn, and seniors are forced to babysit them and fix their mistakes. intern at least learns something and won't repeat that mistake again, chatbot will fall in the same trap right when you run out of context window. this hits all major causes of burnout at once, and maybe senior will leave. then what? there's no junior to promote in their place, because junior was replaced by a chatbot.
this all comes before noticing little things like multibillion dollar stock bubble tied to openai, or their mid-sized-euro-country sized power demands, or whatever monstrosities palantir is cooking, and a couple of others that i'm surely forgetting right now
and also
Is the backlash due to media narratives about AI replacing software engineers?
it's you getting swept in outsized ad campaign for most bloated startup in history, not "backlash in media". what you see as "backlash" is everyone else that's not parroting openai marketing brochure
While I don’t defend them,
are you suure
e: and also, lots of these chatbots are used as accountability sinks. sorry nothing good will ever happen to you because Computer Says No (pay no attention to the oligarch behind the curtain)
e2: also this is partially side effect of silicon valley running out of ideas after crypto crashed and burned, then metaverse crashed and burned, and also after all this all of these people (the same people who ran crypto before, including altman himself) and money went to pump next bubble, because they can't imagine anything else that will bring them that promised infinite growth, and they having money is result of ZIRP that might be coming to end and there will be fear and loathing because vcs somehow unlearned how to make money
For slightly earlier instance of it, there's also real time bidding