Star Trek's universe: Federation citizens live in essentially zero scarcity where labor is optional and people can dedicate their lives to basically anything they like that this within their capabilities.

Star Trek's AI: A typically flawless tool (when the plot doesn't require an incident), optionally used by the individual, to perform complex calculations, simulations or provide immersion entertainment, complimenting whatever task needs done.

Our universe: We live in a capitalist society where the survival of 95% of the population requires them to sell their labor, where the majority of the population works in any job(s) they can get to make ends meet, where working in a creative or intellectually fulfilling field is a rare blessing and prohibitive to most, where your capitalist overlords claim the majority of your productivity for themselves and see the wages they do pay you as a burden to them that should be minimized regardless of your well-being.

Our AI: Devalues or replaces creative and intellectual roles. Forced down the throats of workers and consumers. Used to collectively monitor everyone. Used to push more wealth to a concentrated few. Notably and constantly unreliable while given unearned trust. Not actually intelligent, just good at specific kinds of prediction and parroting based on training from real works from real people that was stolen without the consent of the creators to be fed into the machines to be plagiarized on request. A genuine risk to the stability of our economy. A nightmare for the mental health of children and those vulnerable to delusions and/or thoughts of self-harm. Increasingly used to replace thought and skill development making us collectively dumber and more reliant on it.

There's a handful of differences, I'll leave other point them out.

The difference is that Starfleet has the ethical standards in place to make that technology non disruptive to their society. We wouldn't survive being gifted ships that can glass the planet, for example. Wed fuck that up immediately.

What happens when they become real?

It's a little more than just the genAI part tho.

You can fuck the holograms. If real world genAI was fuckable, FuckAI would not be an anti-AI community; it would be a NSFW one.

Artificial intelligence in science fiction is intelligence that's artificial.

Artificial intelligence in real life is more akin to what we'd call "artificial flavors" in some fruit drink that contains 0% fruit. Isn't fruit, doesn't taste like fruit, but it's purple and sweet, so fuck it: "grape". We've accomplished the "artificial" part, but not the bit that actually matters.

So, yeah, AI in sci-fi is unironically great. "AI" irl is shit. If the real version ever comes close to the sci-fi version, you'll see a lot of the haters change our tune, but until then we'll call a turd a turd.

"Make an opponent capable of defeating Data"

ST AI: Have a supercharged Moriarty.

RL AI: deletes production database

If we got all the other socialist progressive benefits of the Star Trek universe, including no billionaires, then I think we'd be a lot less unhappy with generative AI as presented in that world.

How they built it, and what they plan to do with it is a pretty big part of the reason for our anger.

Holodecks are discrete programs with subroutines.

Perhaps we give it a pass in a post-scarcity world? When capitalism isn't in the picture, it's not taking jobs or ruining the environment or anything like that.

Although, you kinda still have to "write" a holodeck program and it also seems to be slightly harder than prompting or they'd be doing it on the fly a bit more.

1. Holodecks are generative AI that actually works.

2. All LLMs are Generative AI, but not all Generative AIs are LLMs.

How many times did a bad "prompt" nearly destroy the Enterprise? Kill a crew member? Commit sexual harassment, for lack of a better term?