A bulk of Americans really hate AI — and many AI CEOs can’t quite grasp why.
There’s a serious mismatch between public sentiment and corporate excitement over AI. Companies continue to AI-wash layoffs and jam the tech into every corner of their products, yet research keeps finding that Americans are opposed to rampant AI expansion: according to one recent Economist/YouGov poll, a staggering 70 percent of Americans think that AI is “moving too fast,” and about 64 percent believe it’s unlikely that the general population will ever reap future economic benefits of the tech.
Yet no one seems to be more confused than the makers of the tech themselves. Back in January, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang lamented on a podcast that the AI backlash has been “extremely hurtful,” blaming pushback on “doomers” pushing a negative “narrative” of AI. Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman observed in an X post last fall that there are “so many cynics,” and that it “cracks me up when I hear people call AI underwhelming.” And in February, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared that “looking at what’s possible,” in his view, public embrace “does feel sort of surprisingly slow.”
According to Axios’ Madison Mills, tech CEOs have also privately conveyed their bafflement.
“In previous conversations with Axios, AI executives at multiple frontier AI labs were surprised by the negative opinions,” Mills writes. “They see AI as just as inevitable as the rise of the internet.”
And some, apparently, are in outright denial, with Superhuman Mail CEO Rahul Vohra — whose company is currently facing a class action lawsuit over an “expert” editing feature that plundered the likenesses of countless journalists, scientists, and famous dead people without their consent — that Superhuman doesn’t “really see” the negative polling.
It’s a fascinating split-screen, and it’s impossible to untangle AI’s image issues from the rhetoric of AI industry leaders themselves, many of whom have talked extensively about the grave risk of AI-enabled human extinction. And the more hypothetical disaster scenarios aside, the public is also already feeling the more tangible AI risks: air pollution from xAI’s massive data center in Memphis; the ongoing battle over the mass use of copyrighted works to train AI models; AI-tied job loss; worsening scams, disinformation, and abuse material; novel cybersecurity risks; and the life-altering — and in some cases, deadly — mental breakdowns tied to some consumers’ intensive use of sycophantic AI chatbots.
Whereas AI CEOs tend to operate in between the extremes of AI-fueled utopia and total AI apocalypse, the public is living in the reality of current consumer-facing AI tools’ ability and impact. It’s hard to sell people on a future AI-powered paradise when the everyday reality instead feels dystopian.
More on AI and dystopia: If AI Causes a Mass Unemployment Crisis, Will the Public Explode Into Violence?
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