It’s not about nerds.

Marketing doesn’t work with people competent in some area, and works with laymen. You can sell someone, say, a very expensive and nicely looking thing, if that someone doesn’t know exactly how to solve the problem on their own given 5x the time.

(I am such a layman and have been recently sold clearing and digging work for like 2x the normal price, and that’s if we evaluate the work as done perfectly.)

So - with “AI” and such - people are being sold something that doesn’t fulfill any of the basic separable roles. If they can do on their own what said “AI” does, just slower, then they will see that. If they are being sold it as a tool for something they can’t do on their own, then they won’t.

Like people using GPT output instead of arguments on the Internet and not even realizing that it’s a stream of nonsense, because they can’t reason on their own. They can’t tell how a term-riddled word salad is different from a real argument.

If you’ve met people referring to TV experts’ authority and magazines and such, then you’ve seen that confidence combined with blindness.