The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

Legend2440

I am very concerned by the rise of political violence in the US, and I especially don't like how much support it gets on social media. Burning down a warehouse or shooting a politician does not make you a hero.

balamatom

The AI loves it, though!

retired

Downsides of AI: Massive increase in RAM prices, housing crisis worsens as datacenters are build, massive energy usage, children are having trouble learning at school, spreading misinformation is easier than ever. Upsides of AI: I can ask it if my farts are caused by the celery I ate earlier

mannanj

Aren't these types of incidents only expected to rise, as inequality and economic challenges are on the rise, what are hungry, bored, lonely and neglected people going to do? This isn't a surprise - we have neglected American health, wellbeing and happiness and then are telling them "AI is going to come trust us its different this time" and yet for most people their lives get worse as AI company shareholders/employees lives' get better. I'm ashamed that we don't care more about human dignity. I care about human dignity and wonder if I'm an outlier? Even a tiny pledge and affirmation "Hey, we see you, we are working to bring relief and guaranteed dignity to your lives by doing xyz" would help. Instead when I ask for peace in war[edit: and basic income, anything that is an essential part of dignity[edit 2: and I hear its not possible right now while that isn't said of AI investments] I hear unaccountable leadership dodging the responsibility [of their constituents] and accelerating conflict while their friends' pockets get thicker.

MBCook

Are they? I heard a presentation from some pro-AI people on Friday to the large company I work at. They said they surveyed people at an AI conference and 93% of people were excited about it. This was said with a straight face like “people love puppies!”. No self awareness at all.

fnoef

Gee I wonder why? Could it be because they promised to improve our lives but instead we are losing our jobs? Or maybe because there is insane shortage of electronics for the sake of AI data center? No, I think it should be the fact that this tech consumes more power than an average city. Actually, it must the fact that we have autonomous killing drones now. Or maybe it’s the misinformation slop? Nah, it should be the mass stealing of intellectual property. I’m honestly baffled. What’s there not to like?

Tyrubias

This was evident everywhere except within the AI industry itself. The rhetoric from many of the industry’s top leaders has been “this technology will eliminate millions of jobs, fundamentally reshape countless other jobs, and automate the use of lethal force, but we’re going to develop it anyways”. Many of the current economic woes, including mass layoffs, have been blamed on AI by the very executives conducting said layoffs. In addition, the major AI companies have shamelessly stole intellectual property to train their models and shoveled AI down everyone’s throats. Is it any wonder that the general public hates AI? The AI industry isn’t exactly doing its best to appear likable.

cortesoft

I feel like their are (at least) three main critiques of AI, and I wish we could debate them separately, because I think they each have different resolutions. The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on the works of society. The easiest way would be a straight tax on AI usage, and using that tax to pay a universal basic income. There are obviously a ton of variations on this idea, but I think the general premise of sharing the gains with everyone is sound. I don’t think many would complain if they lost their job but kept their income. The other two critiques are trickier. The first is the environmental impact of AI, and the response is difficult. Doing work to make it more efficient, and continuing to develop cleaner energy sources is paramount. Taxing and efficiency requirements might be a start. We have the technology to produce energy in sustainable ways, but it is expensive. It has to be non-negotiable if massive energy usage for AI is to continue. The last is the REAL conversation, and I don’t know the answer. How do we handle AI doing creative work? How do we treat AI creative work? How much creative work do we feel comfortable handing over to AI? I guess there is another issue, related to the last one, which is how do we deal with the ability to use AI to mislead and commit fraud at scale. How do we deal with not being able to trust what actually said/done by a human and what is AI pretending to be human? How do we avoid and mitigate the ability for AI to generate a massive amount of custom content that is used to mislead and defraud people? So much of our current mitigation strategy relies on the assumption that it takes a lot of effort and time to do certain things that can now be done instantly thousands of times?

KaiserPro

I think there is conflation here. Data centres popping up near you probably means higher electricity prices, poor air quality and water problems Sam Altman is a massive penis, with a gift for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. The two things that link them are "rich" people imposing their will on everyone else, publicly.

jmclnx

All people see is job losses and increased costs based upon articles and tweet type things. If due to AI or not, that is what they are seeing. It is like MAGA news, all they see "AI eliminates jobs and AI increases your electric bill". Nothing at this point will make people believe AI is good for the masses. What will need to happen for people to like AI ? I say they will get real $ month after month to cover more than the inflation, not the dumb tax deductions Trump harps on. In this case, maybe 1,000 USD per month adjusted for inflation yearly from AI will end this trend. Why a payment ? All they see is the wealth of the top 1% increasing almost exponentially where they are struggling to pay their 'fixed' expenses. In reality since 2008, the rich has been cashing in while workers have been footing the bill. That is the big issue.

SJMG

I think the truth is in fact asymmetric on this front. People, esp. many SWEs, like generating with AI, or more telling, wouldn't want to give it up in their work. On the other hand, people generally hate consuming the product of gen AI. Consumer experience = mostly negative Producer experience = mostly positive

giancarlostoro

Its really unwarranted some peoples reactions to someone using AI, and in other cases theres no AI used and people blindly assume something is AI and then proceed to write it off as slop, but it wasnt even AI it was just slightly low quality authentic content that you maybe would not have even commented about, we all have seen low quality videos on youtube we didnt freak out about.

masijo

AI has automated my favorite part of the job: coding. Gone is all the experience in clean code, good idioms, etc. All replaced by easily generated shitty code that can be removed and generated again as we please, until it works. No thought about the quality of code itself. Some companies are straight up forcing programmers to live in Claude Code and never even see the code, just write the spec. It’s disgusting. And the worst part is that you can’t opt-out. If you give even the slightest hint that you don’t like AI you’re seen as a Luddite and you’ll be put next in line for the upcoming layoff.

amelius

Them: look how cool we are, stealing your data and making everybody redundant. The people: ?? Investors: Tell us more.

rescripting

The AI CEOs have been screaming for years now about how AI is scary, you should be afraid of it and it’s going to take your job. “Mythos is too dangerous to release.” “OpenAI offers a bounty if you can get ChatGPT to teach you how to do a bioterroism.” “Agentic agents will replace entire categories of jobs. They’ll just be like, gone” This is all signaling to their customers; no not you on their $20/month plan, the governments and corporations of the world who have deep pockets, fat to trim, and borders to defend and expand. It’s no surprise that people don’t like AI. It’s not for people.

devindotcom

certainly people are finding everyday uses... but a lot of those uses are necessitated by enshittification of search and other commonplace tools. so although I think many see the usefulness of the technology here and there, their experience of it is one of being forced to adopt a thing they never asked for by companies with few or no sincere or articulable values. billions use windows and gmail but have a poor opinion of microsoft and google both for obvious reasons. I expect the same will be true of AI platforms and the usual suspects behind them.

keybored

Weird to have these threads and then fifteen minutes later there will be a 350+ comment, 500+ votes thread about some 200 USD/month AI subscription service which is now the I Have Seen The Light moment and My Beautiful Side Projects Are Finally Materializing. This is creative destruction in a whole new sense. Just chugging through genuine (or human) creativity, then training on human prompting, then finally ascending near the cluster of Anthropic/AWS nuclear power plants. And people pay for the pleasure.

Devasta

It has destroyed art, it has destroyed public trust with fabricated videos, it has caused skyrocketing prices in components so stuff like Valves console cannot get made, and its enriched freaks like Sam Altman. The fact that AI acolytes are positively giddy about the above is just icing on the cake.

nayroclade

Bear in mind, in the same survey this article is talking about, nothing and nobody had an overall positive rating amongst those polled. So yeah, AI is unpopular, but it's just one more thing that people hate amongst a broader cultural movement of generalised hate.

DocTomoe

Some perspective ... I really do not see 'the public hating AI' outside of a very specific demographic (17-30 year old artsy types, generally left-leaning). Average everyday people in my area either don't care about AI at all, or like it, using it as a better search engine. The situation might be different in the States, but I'd wager Joe Sixpack, brass fisher in Montana, couldn't care less about GPT-5.5 or whatever Musk is up to these days.