"In fact, no one in my extended sphere of friends and family has asked me anything about chatGPT, midjourney, or any of these other models. The only people I hear about these models from are other tech people."
I have the opposite experience. Everyone I meet outside tech has been exploring ChatGPT, or at least has heard of it and is extremely curious. And in non-tech student circles, a (non STEM) TA I know said students who until a month ago were bad to mediocre (8-12/20 scoring), are suddenly all turning in top 16-18/20 assignments this month. You can argue about what to do given this change, but you can not deny the impact.
I have the same experience. And ChatGPT was the turning point. A few month ago, to my surprise i wasn't even able to excite my non-technical environment about DALL-E 2, not to mention other ML models, that would excite technical people.
I was sitting in a Starbucks yesterday sitting opposite two girls doing some language study and one of them was joking that the other should ask ChatGPT about some grammar point. This idea that only tech people know about it seems way off.
I have the opposite experience. Everyone I meet outside tech has been exploring ChatGPT, or at least has heard of it and is extremely curious. And in non-tech student circles, a (non STEM) TA I know said students who until a month ago were bad to mediocre (8-12/20 scoring), are suddenly all turning in top 16-18/20 assignments this month. You can argue about what to do given this change, but you can not deny the impact.