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The story
An article on note.com introduced the term “middle-aged AI newbie” — a jab at older folks who’ve become obsessed with generative AI — sparking a wave of reactions on 5ch’s gaming hardware (Gehan) board. While some posters argued a “generational reversal” seems to be underway, with middle-aged people adapting to new technology faster than the young, the thread also veered into examples of AI confidently spouting wrong information (“hallucination”) and the ongoing copyright debate over generative AI’s training data, leaving opinions split.
The “middle-aged AI newbie” phenomenon
But watching this whole commotion unfold, something else caught my attention: a recurring character type in online discourse about generative AI — the “middle-aged AI newbie.”
“AI is amazing!”
Source: note.com / Original article here
What people said
while it's the younger generation having an allergic reaction and turning into the "out-of-touch old fogeys" instead.
Middle-aged workers used to be stuck reluctantly training new hires who were basically dead weight, but now thanks to AI they don't need to deal with that garbage anymore — they're thrilled.
Nah, that's not it.
It's the usual thing where the generation gap gets exposed on social media, so old guys overdo it with the latest tech and trends because they want to look even a little younger.
Young people's values are actually all over the map — people are just being mocked for the narrow-mindedness of reducing "kids these days" to one caricature.
but every once in a while it just says something completely wrong.
Made me wonder if AI is simply incapable of saying "I don't know."
Roughly speaking, generative AI just keeps picking "the word most likely to come next as an answer" from its massive training data in response to your prompt, and strings a sentence together that way.
That's why it sometimes outputs pure nonsense (a "hallucination").
Generative AI itself has no built-in ability to judge whether its own output is actually correct, so it rarely comes out with "I don't know" or "I'm not sure."
sometimes even when I tell it to check the reference material, it just skips right over it.
When I call it out it goes back and actually looks properly, so that's fine,
but what's with that? Is AI getting lazy too or something?
AI's access to outside info like the web is restricted, so a lot of the time it's answering from its pre-training data or from info other users have fed it.
If you paste a URL directly, a filtering system sitting in between downloads the page and hands it to the AI so it can actually process it.
That filtering system is the tricky part.
the "middle-aged AI newbie" barrier thing.
At this point I'd call it "entering old age," lol
No wonder they're panicking.
Middle-aged people can just make use of AI, and kids can study assuming they'll use it down the line,
so it's the generation stuck right in between — the ones who want to be recognized by society right now — who must find AI's rise the least fun of all.
NotebookLM, for example, only checks against the info you actually fed it, so it'll flat-out tell you something doesn't exist if it's not there.
Bottom line, anyone who can't even distinguish between a service, an agent, and a model is out of their depth here — but online AI takes tend to be sloppy about exactly that kind of distinction.
Re: #47
is supposed to prove the point, but…
if you're bad at it, AI won't save you.
Even on this board you've got clumsy people showing off and spamming posts — that's basically anti-AI-level bad.
They're the ones using AI in arguments and showing off wrong info.
What's your basis for assuming the guy arguing is young?
Yeah, it's mostly old people after all.
The way these guys chant "it's legal, it's legal" to justify generative AI trampling on rights — their writing style is creepy on a whole other level.
They're clearly bad at Japanese too, you can't even hold a conversation with them.
What other basis besides "it's legal" would you even need to show the rights issue is actually fine?
That's a hallucination.
If it's not, show me the evidence.
Give it a rest already.
Well then let me ask — what right exists, how exactly is it being violated, and what's the actual problem?
This is dumb, I'm not bothering.
As for individual cases, that's exactly the kind of thing people are already arguing back and forth about all over the internet.
And at the national and international level there are plenty of issues that have made the news too.
I'm not doing some stupid slap-fight over a question that vague and lazy.
Go ask your precious AI.
Copying someone else's data is illegal to begin with, and AI training done for enjoyment purposes or that competes commercially with the original is also illegal.
The problem is people twisting that with the sophistry that it's fine because it's "for analysis purposes."
Wake up, middle-aged man — mistaking "the law just hasn't caught up yet" for "so there's no problem" is the crazy part.
that people believe the wrong answer is correct and it can't be corrected.
But then again, there are plenty of naturally-wrong-about-everything people who don't even use AI.
And when those naturally-wrong people start using AI, don't they just turn into bots who blindly believe whatever AI spits out is correct?
Just quietly get great results with AI and keep your mouth shut about it.
The moment you use AI you're nothing but a plagiarist, so there's no "results" to speak of.
You're just a thief.
A typewriter doesn't generate text on its own, you know?
Don't lump it in with a tool that auto-generates text, images, and video from a simple prompt.
Judging by our other posts, you and I are probably basically on the same page, so there's no point fighting over this.
People have been saying that about Google since back when it was just a search engine.
That's exactly why I hate AI threads.
The guy who comes charging in the second he spots "AI,"
gets red-faced just bashing it,
and thinks that makes him high-level?
If you ranked all of humanity, he'd get counted from the bottom.
Sounds like he'd fail the credit check on a used Alphard residual-value loan (zan-kure — a common Japanese car financing plan), too.
Background and key points of the debate
The phrase “middle-aged AI newbie” is said to have emerged as a mocking label for people eagerly jumping on new technology, against the backdrop of the rapid spread of generative AI tools like ChatGPT. The thread split over how to read this: some saw it as middle-aged people getting ahead of the curve on new tech that young people would normally be expected to lead on, while others saw it as simply older people latching onto AI because they want to look younger. There was also back-and-forth over whether AI training data use is “legal or illegal” — Japan’s Copyright Act Article 30-4 does permit using copyrighted works for information-analysis purposes under certain conditions, so the claim that it’s “legal” does have a basis in law. At the same time, whether that sits right with rights holders, and how individual cases should be judged, remains a separate, ongoing debate both in Japan and abroad. This gap between what the law says and how people actually feel about it is one reason the thread never converged.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry “Gehan”) thread “[Barrier, Sad News] The insult “middle-aged AI newbie” quietly catching on among Gen Z.”
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