In a May Gallup poll, 71% of US adults said they would oppose a new AI data center being built near them, while only 53% said they would oppose a new nuclear power plant. Given the choice, people would rather have a reactor down the road than a server farm.
That same month, though, ChatGPT reached a billion monthly users, according to market analysis firm Sensor Tower.
Both facts hold at the same time, and they capture how much of the world now feels about AI. People love the tools and hate them in roughly equal measure.
A self-loathing AI company
Over the summer I interviewed the CEO of Springboards, a startup developing an LLM built to give a wider range of responses than its mainstream competitors. Early in our conversation he made a remark that has stayed with me ever since.
“We often say that we’re a self-loathing AI company. We don’t know if we really like what we’re doing,” the CEO of Springboards said.
I joked that this made me a self-loathing AI journalist. I enjoy my job. What I dislike is a lot of what the technology I write about has become. Hype has warped WARPED $0.00008499 ▲ +6% it, zealots are steering it, and there’s no getting away from it.
Many people share that feeling, and the polls show it.
The numbers keep getting worse
The Pew Research Center found that more US adults expect AI to have a negative effect on them personally and on society as a whole than expect a positive one. Young people are the most pessimistic of all.
The outlook abroad isn’t much brighter. A Stanford University report found that more than half of people around the world say AI products and services make them nervous. And in a March NBC poll, AI scored worse than ICE.
Those are grim numbers for an industry that wants to rebuild the economy around what it sells.
Usage keeps climbing anyway
Google DeepMind's Gemini trails ChatGPT only slightly, with 950 million users recorded in July. According to Pew, half of US adults now say they use a chatbot. That’s more than double the share who said so in 2023, and one in four say they use one every day.
The habit isn’t limited to the US. In all 38 OECD countries, a bloc of the world’s wealthiest democracies, more than a third of adults say they’ve used generative AI tools in the last three months.
So plenty of people dislike AI, and plenty of people can’t stop using it.
The same people, most likely
Maybe these are two separate groups. I doubt it. At usage levels this high, the numbers only add up if the Venn diagram is closing into a circle.
It could also be that the more people use AI, the less they like it. There’s at least a correlation in that direction. The Global North, where adoption is highest, tends to be pessimistic, while the Global South, where adoption is lower, is more optimistic.
My view is that most of the anger is aimed at the companies, and specifically at their relentless push to wedge AI into every corner of our lives. These are the same companies that keep warning us to prepare for the biggest social and economic upheaval in generations. Feeling anxious after hearing that is a reasonable response.
We’ve watched this movie before
Social media went the same way over the past 20 years. Billions of people signed up for Facebook and Twitter even as the techlash against the companies behind them grew. Google search followed the same arc.
Social media users didn’t have much leverage. Leaving a platform meant giving up your content and your connections, so you could either put up with it or start over from nothing.
AI could turn out differently. This time there’s clearly more political appetite for regulation. Every one of the 50 US states has either passed or proposed laws on how AI is developed and deployed. Together they form a patchwork of more than 2,100 bills nationwide, ten times as many as three years ago.
There’s real competition too. Several top-tier open-source alternatives to Google, OpenAI and Anthropic are already out there, which gives consumers more choice and puts pressure on the market, at least for now.
No walking it back, but room to steer
I’m not naïve. Trillion-dollar companies are hard to move. Still, what happens next isn’t as inevitable as those companies would have us believe.
I asked the Springboards CEO why he was building a new model if he didn’t much like AI. He said there was no walking back from LLMs, but you could still make them do something different.
I’d like to see more of that: AI that’s upfront about what it can and can’t do, and that stops acting like it’s about to take over the world. That might do more to improve the polling than another billion users would.