Over the summer I talked to the CEO of Springboards, a startup building an LLM that’s designed to come up with a wider variety of responses than its mainstream rivals do. At the start of the call, he said something that’s been stuck in my head since: “We often say that we’re a self-loathing AI company. We don’t know if we really like what we’re doing.”
“I guess that makes me a self-loathing AI journalist,” I replied. It was a joke! I love my job. But I do not love many of the things the technology I write about has become: warped by hype, steered by zealots, inescapable.
The CEO of Springboards and I are far from alone. Around the world, a love/hate attitude toward AI is very much the vibe right now.
On the one hand, public feelings are souring fast. According to the Pew Research Center, more adults in the US think AI will have a negative impact on them personally, and on society in general, than expect a positive one. The pessimism is strongest among the young.
More than half of people worldwide say that AI products and services make them nervous, according to a report from Stanford University. In a Gallup poll in May, 71% of US adults said they would oppose construction of a new AI data center in their area, far more than the 53% who said they would oppose a new nuclear power plant. And in an NBC poll in March, AI was less popular than ICE.
Yet the number of people using AI is still skyrocketing. ChatGPT hit a billion monthly users in May, according to the market analysis firm Sensor Tower. Google DeepMind’s Gemini is close behind, logging 950 million users in July.
According to Pew, half of US adults now say they use a chatbot, more than twice the number who said they did in 2023. One in four people say they do so every day. And it’s a global habit: More than a third of adults across all 38 OECD countries (a group of the world’s wealthiest democracies) report having used generative AI tools in the last three months.
All these surveys paint a picture of two contradictory truths: A lot of people really do not like AI and a lot of people cannot get enough of it. What’s going on?
It’s possible that these are two distinct groups, but I doubt it. The numbers don’t add up unless the Venn diagram is on its way to being a circle.
It’s also possible that the more people use AI, the more negative their opinions about it will be. There’s at least a correlation to back this up: The Global North, where adoption is highest, skews pessimistic. In the Global South, where adoption levels are lower, people are more optimistic.
But here’s what I really think is going on: When people say they hate AI it’s not the technology they dislike but, rather, the relentless drive of the companies behind it to push the tech upon us in as many ways as possible. They’re telling us to brace for the biggest social and economic upheaval in generations. How do they expect people to feel?
In many ways, we’ve been here before. We saw a similar dynamic play out with social media over the last 20 years. Billions flocked to Facebook and Twitter despite mounting techlash against the companies that ran those services. Ditto for Google search.
With social media there wasn’t much anyone could do. Quitting a platform meant losing all your content and connections, giving you the choice to suck it up or start over. But with AI there’s still a chance for people to have some sway. There’s certainly more political appetite for regulation this time around. All 50 US states have either passed or proposed laws governing the development and deployment of AI, creating a patchwork of more than 2,100 bills across the country—a tenfold increase in three years.
And with a number of top-class open-source alternatives to Google and OpenAI and Anthropic already on the market, there’s also (for now, at least) the potential for more consumer choice and the market pressure that goes with it.
I don’t want to be naïve. Trillion-dollar companies are hard to move. But what comes next is not as inevitable as those companies often imply. When I asked the Springboards CEO why his firm was developing a new model if he didn’t really like AI, he told me there was no walking back from LLMs—but you could still make them do something different.
Here’s hoping we see a lot more of something different: Clarity about what AI can and cannot do and, crucially, a technology that’s not sold as if it’s about to take over the world.
