if ai stans want to build trust in AI, they should have embraced sensible regulation instead of spending millions to elect pols unwilling to lift a single finger.
congrats, you have regulatory captured the entire industry and the U.S. government. everybody hates you because they can see money leaving their community to inflate the stock portfolio of some asshole on a yacht.
Data-centres are being built at an astonishing rate, but frequently without the informed consent of locals and in a way that's a nuisance. It's possible to build data-centres that recycle water with near perfect efficiency, but many guzzle local water continuously because doing so is cheaper. They can be built to be quiet, but many are built so poorly that they seemingly violate noise pollution laws, which are magically not enforced. Those building data-centres could also build their own power generation capacity but, more typically, they rely on the local power grid and drive up prices. An immense amount of new GHG emissions is directly attributable to AI right when the world needs to be cutting back. There's also the immense sucking up of RAM and chips that has made computer hardware unaffordable for many.
That is a lot of negatives being absorbed by everyone before you even talk about the impact on jobs or where the profits are going. Regulatory capture may be working for now, but people are going to push back if they don't start seeing benefits for them personally or their communities. AI companies seem to be so preoccupied with driving each other out of business that they may completely lose their social license to continue operating.
Behave like criminals and, sooner or later, you'll be treated like criminals no matter who you have in your pocket.
They don't want to build trust.
They want to build a trust wedge between the people making the buying decisions and the people with hands on experience of the product.
When an employee says AI isn't speeding up his work, the only thing the CEO hears is "Wow, this employee is so scared of getting replaced that he's lying about how great AI is" and he will pick up the phone to Anthropic to buy more licenses.
It's sort of brilliant actually. No way to make a product grow fast enough without bypassing the employees and targeting the decision layer directly.
I don't think they'd hate AI so much if they didn't see it as being controlled by the same people (and types of people) who made Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Amazon, Netflix, Google, etc. all go downhill over the last decade and suck.
There are plenty of other reasons for people to hate the AI industry. the OpenAI, Deepseek and Anthropic people are a whole new collection of tech elites, separate from the old tech elites that were hated before.
I have to say, while I can't seem to escape constant articles about the drama of OpenAI and Anthropic, about Altman and Amodei and at various times other figures in these companies, I had to look up Liang Wenfang and frankly what I do find seems to suggest that there may be some upsides to China's lower relative deference to CEOs than the US
What is the use case for the average non-technical person?
LLMs are cool and all but I feel like the average person is not really getting enough value out of them to keep the "wow this thing will probably make me jobless in 5 years" thoughts out.
My mom uses to take and create pictures of things: identifying birds, identifying trees, and showing her house with different decor. I didn't teach her any of this, she just figured it out on her own.
A non-tech friend of mine who's writing a book uses it to get feedback on his writing. He's gotten pretty good at crafting prompts to get it to be fairly objective.
Another non-tech friend used it to do a lot of journaling and processing after a recent breakup.
A non-techy friend who happens to work in tech uses it to make presentations at work.
Another non-techy friend of mine who works at a tech startup uses it to browse LinkedIn and find people she's searching for.
My point is that I just don't think the value-add for any of these are worth the existential dread most people have about losing their career.
Then there's the scams, misinformation, trying to find a job when every recruiter is using AI to filter job listings, etc.
It’s really not hard to think of examples. Copywriter with an English degree from a state university who used to write boring blog articles for the local vet office. They aren’t really needed anymore to write the yearly article about ticks in the summer. Doesn’t mean they are enjoying any of the benefit.
Having Claude calculate which beers are the best deal at the bar based on price to alcohol from a picture of the menu is currently a massive party trick.
Outside of programmers, almost no one has actually seen AI be useful for anything except do a barely acceptable job at a task they could have done better if they felt like it.
Not all programmers with AI mandates have seen this yet either.
The biggest market for AI, possibly even bigger than tech, is mass manipulation, lying, and scamming. Destabilizing countries has never been easier now that social media and messengers allow believable lies and manipulation to spread like wildfire, and the AI industry has massively reduced the cost of believable lies.
Up until a few years ago, believable videos of politicians or famous people or people targeted for blackmail were expensive and required acting or VFX work. Now anyone can do it with a handful of dollars and half an hour to spend.
The industry is threatening to enrich the elite by taking people's jobs in economic uncertain times while at the same time resource hogging data centers are popping up all over the world like weeds. Big AI couldn't be more dislikable if they tried.
My favorite use is to give me PhD level tours of art museums and historic sites. It seems to know everything about every single artwork, the lives of the artists, and the economic and cultural context. It's willing to go at my pace and field as many or as few questions as I want.
Frequently use it to come up with recipes when cooking, repair electrical equipment, or seek medical advice and results interpretation for my family.
It's pretty hard to imagine life without it at this point. I know it's possible, but like the internet, I would feel crippled by the lack of information and things that I can no longer easily do
uh yeah, all the subscriber numbers from ai companies are because it was baked into every product humans already used on their tech i.e. browsers and search engines.
j/k, but I'm pretty sure you could substitute "AI" with a few other keywords here that a lot of people use/depend on: Govt, Healthcare, Social Security, Airport security, heck maybe even science.
The real question is how do you scale something without eroding trust. Transparency has to be part of it but I doubt that it's the only piece of the puzzle and no matter how good your intentions are, there are always people that will refuse their trust (I'm not judging, it's just a fact). As a distributed systems person, I think systems in general work best when they can deal with mistrust and people choose to rather than being forced to use your system to solve their problems. AI is not there yet.
The problem is more general. Trust in American institutions peaked in the 1950s. Starting in the 1960s, Americans began to slowly withdraw from institutions, and also distrust them. Robert Putnam covers this in his book "Bowling Alone." Americans stopped going to the local meetings of their local town government, and Americans became more suspicious of local decisions. Americans became less interested in local news and more interested in national news (partly that was the shift in news-consumption-habits away from the local paper and towards national television). Americans slowly became more likely to believe in conspiracy theories of all kinds. During the 1970s, Americans demanded more democracy from their institutions, and many reforms were passed, including the Sunshine Laws, that were passed in almost all 50 states, making government more transparent, yet Americans became less trusting despite the greater transparency. Also during the 1970s, Americans demanded that the inner workings of Congress be made more democratic, and so the committee chairmen were stripped of their powers and each committee became purer in its democracy, which caused more procedural motions, which slowed down the actual work, which caused Americans to trust Congress less. Barbara Sinclair wrote a famous book (at least it was famous within the world of political science) called "Unorthodox Lawmaking" which tracks the breakdown of the normal lawmaking processes of Congress during the period from 1970 to 2015. All of these trends were mild from 1960 to 2000 and then they accelerated after 2000. Americans became less trusting of church, government, charity, the police, the teachers, the newspapers, the Fed, the CIA, the FBI, the unions, the Boy Scouts, and Americans became more divided over the military. There was an increase in general paranoia. The current frenzy over AI is part of the longer trend.
From what I can tell, all of America's institutions were reformed during the era after 1970 and yet Americans became less trustful of those same institutions. It is likely that some of the reforms had negative side effects, especially the attempt to make the committees inside of Congress more pure in their democracy, thereby making them less effective.
This feels like fake news, like the people asked leading questions. going by what I actually see, I see regular people using ai constantly at coffee shops and cafes all over the world. Non tech friends tell me all the things they are doing with ai from various learning things to planning parties to organizing meetings, designing business plans, etc
I see no evidence American’s don’t trust AI so I suspect loaded questions
Large numbers of people don't trust social media but still use it. People complain about unhealthy food but eat it. People worry about microplastics but drink bottled water. And so on.
It's quite common in modern society that people use things they don't particularly like, for a variety of reasons. One is that the society is being structured so that it's difficult to avoid its most toxic parts.
As it relates to AI, it certainly doesn't help that everyone is being told they need to learn AI or risk being eliminated by it.
I wonder if having the world's largest search engine putting it front and center for every search query and can't disable it has something to do with it. Or for the world's largest social media platforms put it front and center and you can't disable it. Or for every employer mandating its use. Surely the people just love it so much they can't help but gravitate to these tools.
Well, the worrying thing about using AI is how you regulate something you don't understand. I mean, the sequence of weights an AI has to give answers... they're not even very sure how a specific personality emerges with certain weights... so regulation seems a bit distant.
> This feels like fake news, like the people asked leading questions. going by what I actually see
So your evidence of why this is fake news is a very small anecdotal sample size in presumably an urban area of people doing mundane things with ai? Why should that any more reliable source of information as opposed to my anecdotal observations of plenty of white collar workers having negative sentiments on ai because they think they’re being forced out of livelihoods? Why should I believe you’re not spreading “fake news” because you have vested interests in AI?
If you leave large metro areas you'll find people are absolutely rabidly against AI. Go to a little blue collar town and ask about it where there are no hip coffee shops for wfh techies.
I have worked in software since 2007 and I have been unemployed for almost 6 months. Getting any new job will require me to use AI tools, even if I think they’re awful, harmful bullshit. I am one of the people you might see using AI, and I absolutely hate it.
if ai stans want to build trust in AI, they should have embraced sensible regulation instead of spending millions to elect pols unwilling to lift a single finger.
congrats, you have regulatory captured the entire industry and the U.S. government. everybody hates you because they can see money leaving their community to inflate the stock portfolio of some asshole on a yacht.
It's that, but more too.
Data-centres are being built at an astonishing rate, but frequently without the informed consent of locals and in a way that's a nuisance. It's possible to build data-centres that recycle water with near perfect efficiency, but many guzzle local water continuously because doing so is cheaper. They can be built to be quiet, but many are built so poorly that they seemingly violate noise pollution laws, which are magically not enforced. Those building data-centres could also build their own power generation capacity but, more typically, they rely on the local power grid and drive up prices. An immense amount of new GHG emissions is directly attributable to AI right when the world needs to be cutting back. There's also the immense sucking up of RAM and chips that has made computer hardware unaffordable for many.
That is a lot of negatives being absorbed by everyone before you even talk about the impact on jobs or where the profits are going. Regulatory capture may be working for now, but people are going to push back if they don't start seeing benefits for them personally or their communities. AI companies seem to be so preoccupied with driving each other out of business that they may completely lose their social license to continue operating.
Behave like criminals and, sooner or later, you'll be treated like criminals no matter who you have in your pocket.
AI stans dont actually affect company policy as much as they like to think they do.
The US government already favors corruption as an approach so I am not sure theres anything to be done here.
>congrats, you have regulatory captured the entire industry and the U.S. government.
Incredibly cheap date.
>everybody hates you because they can see money leaving their community to inflate the stock portfolio of some asshole on a yacht.
Having issues parsing this. If you hate AI just dont pay for it?
They don't want to build trust. They want to build a trust wedge between the people making the buying decisions and the people with hands on experience of the product.
When an employee says AI isn't speeding up his work, the only thing the CEO hears is "Wow, this employee is so scared of getting replaced that he's lying about how great AI is" and he will pick up the phone to Anthropic to buy more licenses.
It's sort of brilliant actually. No way to make a product grow fast enough without bypassing the employees and targeting the decision layer directly.
What is stans and pols?
A stan is a supporter/booster of whatever. I do not remember the origin.
Pol here is abbreviated politician.
Comes from the Eminem song Stan, about an obsessed fan named Stan.
from the eminem song stan (also possibly from super-fan)
Where's the "T" come from?
Stanley is a toponymic surname, a contraction of stan (a form of "stone") and leigh (meadow), later also being used as a masculine given name.
It's a reference to the name Stanley, 'stan' is the signature at the end of letters being read in the song
I had heard the folk etymology "stalker fan"
Worth noting: article posted Apr 8, 2025
I'm curious how much has public opinion changed since then.
Not much, it seems
https://www.axios.com/2026/05/17/ai-backlash-polling-sentime...
(2025)
Misleading OP
To be entirely fair the sentiment isn’t improving.
I don't think they'd hate AI so much if they didn't see it as being controlled by the same people (and types of people) who made Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Amazon, Netflix, Google, etc. all go downhill over the last decade and suck.
It being made by anyone linked to Venture Capital or any publicly traded company also are non-starters at this point.
If it was crammed down our throats in the same way by different people we’d still hate it just as much.
There are plenty of other reasons for people to hate the AI industry. the OpenAI, Deepseek and Anthropic people are a whole new collection of tech elites, separate from the old tech elites that were hated before.
I have to say, while I can't seem to escape constant articles about the drama of OpenAI and Anthropic, about Altman and Amodei and at various times other figures in these companies, I had to look up Liang Wenfang and frankly what I do find seems to suggest that there may be some upsides to China's lower relative deference to CEOs than the US
Turns out media fear mongering for clicks works
What is the use case for the average non-technical person?
LLMs are cool and all but I feel like the average person is not really getting enough value out of them to keep the "wow this thing will probably make me jobless in 5 years" thoughts out.
My mom uses to take and create pictures of things: identifying birds, identifying trees, and showing her house with different decor. I didn't teach her any of this, she just figured it out on her own.
A non-tech friend of mine who's writing a book uses it to get feedback on his writing. He's gotten pretty good at crafting prompts to get it to be fairly objective.
Another non-tech friend used it to do a lot of journaling and processing after a recent breakup.
A non-techy friend who happens to work in tech uses it to make presentations at work.
Another non-techy friend of mine who works at a tech startup uses it to browse LinkedIn and find people she's searching for.
These are all good examples.
My point is that I just don't think the value-add for any of these are worth the existential dread most people have about losing their career. Then there's the scams, misinformation, trying to find a job when every recruiter is using AI to filter job listings, etc.
How can something be simultaneously useless to the average person and likely to create massive joblessness?
It’s really not hard to think of examples. Copywriter with an English degree from a state university who used to write boring blog articles for the local vet office. They aren’t really needed anymore to write the yearly article about ticks in the summer. Doesn’t mean they are enjoying any of the benefit.
> What is the use case for the average non-technical person?
"I used the button they made biggest and closest to the top of the page."
Now if they could just vote for politicians and a political party that will do something about it…we might get somewhere.
And yet all of them use it...
Having Claude calculate which beers are the best deal at the bar based on price to alcohol from a picture of the menu is currently a massive party trick.
Outside of programmers, almost no one has actually seen AI be useful for anything except do a barely acceptable job at a task they could have done better if they felt like it.
Not all programmers with AI mandates have seen this yet either.
Whether they want to or not even
No one uses it outside of tech or office jobs. There's no use case.
I think it's worse than that.
The biggest market for AI, possibly even bigger than tech, is mass manipulation, lying, and scamming. Destabilizing countries has never been easier now that social media and messengers allow believable lies and manipulation to spread like wildfire, and the AI industry has massively reduced the cost of believable lies.
Up until a few years ago, believable videos of politicians or famous people or people targeted for blackmail were expensive and required acting or VFX work. Now anyone can do it with a handful of dollars and half an hour to spend.
The industry is threatening to enrich the elite by taking people's jobs in economic uncertain times while at the same time resource hogging data centers are popping up all over the world like weeds. Big AI couldn't be more dislikable if they tried.
Use it for... what exactly?
My favorite use is to give me PhD level tours of art museums and historic sites. It seems to know everything about every single artwork, the lives of the artists, and the economic and cultural context. It's willing to go at my pace and field as many or as few questions as I want.
Frequently use it to come up with recipes when cooking, repair electrical equipment, or seek medical advice and results interpretation for my family.
It's pretty hard to imagine life without it at this point. I know it's possible, but like the internet, I would feel crippled by the lack of information and things that I can no longer easily do
uh yeah, all the subscriber numbers from ai companies are because it was baked into every product humans already used on their tech i.e. browsers and search engines.
> Most Americans
They asked 174.6 million people?
you should ask your flatterbox about random sampling
[delayed]
probably just a ChatGPT
j/k, but I'm pretty sure you could substitute "AI" with a few other keywords here that a lot of people use/depend on: Govt, Healthcare, Social Security, Airport security, heck maybe even science.
The real question is how do you scale something without eroding trust. Transparency has to be part of it but I doubt that it's the only piece of the puzzle and no matter how good your intentions are, there are always people that will refuse their trust (I'm not judging, it's just a fact). As a distributed systems person, I think systems in general work best when they can deal with mistrust and people choose to rather than being forced to use your system to solve their problems. AI is not there yet.
The problem is more general. Trust in American institutions peaked in the 1950s. Starting in the 1960s, Americans began to slowly withdraw from institutions, and also distrust them. Robert Putnam covers this in his book "Bowling Alone." Americans stopped going to the local meetings of their local town government, and Americans became more suspicious of local decisions. Americans became less interested in local news and more interested in national news (partly that was the shift in news-consumption-habits away from the local paper and towards national television). Americans slowly became more likely to believe in conspiracy theories of all kinds. During the 1970s, Americans demanded more democracy from their institutions, and many reforms were passed, including the Sunshine Laws, that were passed in almost all 50 states, making government more transparent, yet Americans became less trusting despite the greater transparency. Also during the 1970s, Americans demanded that the inner workings of Congress be made more democratic, and so the committee chairmen were stripped of their powers and each committee became purer in its democracy, which caused more procedural motions, which slowed down the actual work, which caused Americans to trust Congress less. Barbara Sinclair wrote a famous book (at least it was famous within the world of political science) called "Unorthodox Lawmaking" which tracks the breakdown of the normal lawmaking processes of Congress during the period from 1970 to 2015. All of these trends were mild from 1960 to 2000 and then they accelerated after 2000. Americans became less trusting of church, government, charity, the police, the teachers, the newspapers, the Fed, the CIA, the FBI, the unions, the Boy Scouts, and Americans became more divided over the military. There was an increase in general paranoia. The current frenzy over AI is part of the longer trend.
From what I can tell, all of America's institutions were reformed during the era after 1970 and yet Americans became less trustful of those same institutions. It is likely that some of the reforms had negative side effects, especially the attempt to make the committees inside of Congress more pure in their democracy, thereby making them less effective.
This feels like fake news, like the people asked leading questions. going by what I actually see, I see regular people using ai constantly at coffee shops and cafes all over the world. Non tech friends tell me all the things they are doing with ai from various learning things to planning parties to organizing meetings, designing business plans, etc
I see no evidence American’s don’t trust AI so I suspect loaded questions
Large numbers of people don't trust social media but still use it. People complain about unhealthy food but eat it. People worry about microplastics but drink bottled water. And so on.
It's quite common in modern society that people use things they don't particularly like, for a variety of reasons. One is that the society is being structured so that it's difficult to avoid its most toxic parts.
As it relates to AI, it certainly doesn't help that everyone is being told they need to learn AI or risk being eliminated by it.
I wonder if having the world's largest search engine putting it front and center for every search query and can't disable it has something to do with it. Or for the world's largest social media platforms put it front and center and you can't disable it. Or for every employer mandating its use. Surely the people just love it so much they can't help but gravitate to these tools.
Well, the worrying thing about using AI is how you regulate something you don't understand. I mean, the sequence of weights an AI has to give answers... they're not even very sure how a specific personality emerges with certain weights... so regulation seems a bit distant.
> This feels like fake news, like the people asked leading questions. going by what I actually see
So your evidence of why this is fake news is a very small anecdotal sample size in presumably an urban area of people doing mundane things with ai? Why should that any more reliable source of information as opposed to my anecdotal observations of plenty of white collar workers having negative sentiments on ai because they think they’re being forced out of livelihoods? Why should I believe you’re not spreading “fake news” because you have vested interests in AI?
If you leave large metro areas you'll find people are absolutely rabidly against AI. Go to a little blue collar town and ask about it where there are no hip coffee shops for wfh techies.
https://x.com/projomike/status/2055850621832446432
People use it; they also understand that the end goal of AI is to automate away the vast majority of white collar jobs and enrich the capital class.
I use the internet but I don't trust it.
I have worked in software since 2007 and I have been unemployed for almost 6 months. Getting any new job will require me to use AI tools, even if I think they’re awful, harmful bullshit. I am one of the people you might see using AI, and I absolutely hate it.
how are you supposed to avoid it when it's baked into literally every product we already used the most i.e. browsers and search engines
verge is very anti-ai and they are biased against it. I like their content but a few of their writers truly see the devil in ai