AI was supposed to win people over by now — it hasn’t

Despite its technological progress, AI’s reputation out in the real world is getting worse. On Wednesday, Axios reported that the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent a memo to top AI companies warning that U.S. data centers are hurting the party’s chances in a key Ohio election. At the same time, Pew Research released a study that found that Americans’ unease about AI is growing — 52% said they’re “more concerned than excited” about the increased use of AI in daily life, up from 37% in 2021.

A recent CNBC poll of 18- to 34-year-olds found that, when given the names of nine top leaders in the AI industry, a majority of the respondents said they don’t trust those people to “act responsibly” when it comes to AI. A May Economist/YouGov poll found that over 70% of Americans think AI is advancing too quickly. The list goes on.

All that discontent is starting to show up on balance sheets. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that tech companies are facing a public relations crisis over their plans to build AI data centers across the U.S., leading them to agree to sweeten the deals — offering job guarantees, clean water investments, and other local perks. (In one case, that even included $50,000 bonuses for teachers in a Louisiana parish.)

The underlying sentiment spanning these stories is that consumers don’t see how AI is making their lives better, but they’re still being asked to absorb the costs. For an industry that has raised hundreds of billions of dollars on the promise of AI’s inevitability, that souring public sentiment is becoming a business problem, not just a PR debacle, and the industry’s own leaders are starting to notice.

Today, many consumers think of AI in narrower terms, like AI chatbots or AI search experiences (like the now AI-transformed Google). They see AI features infiltrating their everyday products, from email to TVs, whether they wanted them or not. They view AI as a tool that’s helping kids cheat in school, including at the college level, raising questions about the value of a degree. They hear of AI bots training on piles of intellectual property belonging to others so AI can be used to create art, videos, music, and writing — things that have historically been the output of humans.

It’s no shock then that AI appears to be facing more consumer backlash than other transformative technologies did, like the iPhone, the personal computer, or even the internet itself, at similar stages of adoption.

Yet there are still those surprised by consumers’ reaction. They assumed AI’s adoption would lead to acceptance, and its ubiquity would ultimately have consumers feeling positively about the technology, as it became a part of the vast majority of tech products and services.

Instead, consumer trends are pointing in the opposite direction. Young people, in particular, are showing interest in adopting retro technology, ranging from dumbphones to point-and-shoot cameras to tape decks and CD players. AI-free, algorithm-free classic iPods are selling for top dollar on eBay. So-called “grandma hobbies” like quilting, knitting, jigsaw puzzles, cards, and games like Mahjong are suddenly everywhere. In-person meetups and activities, like run clubs, are winning out over online dating.

Some in Silicon Valley may think this stems from a messaging problem: that perhaps execs need to explain AI better to consumers, so people can fully understand its benefits.

The reality, however, could be that consumers understand AI well enough as it is, but don’t think the trade-offs are worth it. When the upside offered isn’t automated jobs with increased pay and reduced workweeks, but instead the threat of job loss, paired with AI features consumers find far less compelling — things like summarized web pages, or chatty TVs — that skepticism hardens.

There are those in the industry waking up to this.

On a recent podcast, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky acknowledged that the AI backlash is real, and that it’s largely tied to the fact that the industry isn’t shipping products that “regular people” like.

“I think part of it’s a narrative issue that we’re not talking about AI correctly,” Chesky said. “But part of it is we need to actually be developing more products that just regular people can use and say, ‘I love AI because AI allows me to have a doctor on demand and I can’t have that. I can’t afford that.’ And so I think we need more regular things.”

Even Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, one of the industry’s most prominent leaders, admitted in a post on X this week that negative public perception of AI is a “big problem” that’s fundamentally a “crisis of trust.” He said people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry, as they “suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over.”

The solution, he said, was to deliver on AI’s promises — for example, curing cancer.

“I think by far the most accurate criticism of AI companies, including Anthropic, is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world. That is totally on us,” he noted.