I must say, all this AI came in like a lightning strike for me. I'm on a computer all day every day, with large portions of that time watching youtube, news and other content creation based around sciences and generally on the more academic side.
I've obviously been aware of AI being a thing and the philosophical discussions around it - music AI has been around for years - but the suddenness of the implementation of AI art and then, out of nowhere, ChatGPT and that coding one that can now do high level coding... it seems to have been blasted out of a cannon into my face.
In this regard i'd consider myself fairly representative of your average person, a tinge more connected to frontier developments than most. So if its hitting me like that, i'm pretty sure it's even crazier for the majority of people
Perhaps it depends on what people are into. I think that for many of the people I have talked with, it is of little surprise, because anything that is codifiable, can be encoded into an AI. This is codifiable and photo editing software has been doing components of it for decades, it is just that people weren't paying attention.
The coding software has been available for a few years already to the point that many low-level coders aren't required, and again, this has been happening for a while.
But perhaps for those who are paying attention to the current outcome, aren't necessarily putting all the pieces together that lead to what is not too far down the track.