I don’t buy the argument. The article claims Americans hate AI because they were promised “lots of cheap stuff” and it hasn’t arrived.
I’ve just never heard this “promise” repeated by any normies. The only thing I hear over and over is “AI will help create medicines to solve all diseases” (or something to that effect). Even then, I don’t get the sense that anyone is expecting that in the short term.
Isn’t the threat of job destruction a much more likely explanation?
I agree that there's insufficient evidence to believe the premise that "Americans hate AI because it has failed to deliver on its promises".
Even accepting it for the sake of argument, I don't think it has failed at all. It has completely revolutionized a handful of fields and is increasingly doing so in others.
Further - it's still very early. Agents have really only begun to take off so far in 2026, and we're still probably 6-12 months from the real uptick in the adoption curve I expect. The first sign of that happening was Manus, followed by the various CUA features of the big players, and more recently: Muse.
As much as I hate to say it, Meta knocked it out of the park with Muse, to the point that just this morning I bought a 60 gallon (shop-sized) air compressor on Marketplace from a middle-aged couple in rural Missouri who used Muse to coordinate pickup. If that's not a sign that consumer adoption is starting to take off, I don't know what is.
Quick question: How many "fields" do you think this is, and what percentage of all "fields" do you think this represents?
Tech people talking about tech trends spilling outside of tech always gets a bit ivory tower to me...
Remember VR? Remember how Oculus was going to revolutionize visual interface and change gaming forever? Remember how their acquisition by Meta was the beginning of the Metaverse? Because middle-aged couple from rural Missouri probably doesn't.
I’d guess maybe a dozen, and acknowledge that “fields” is a fuzzy division to begin with.
Maybe 5-10% of the overall economy at most, at least in terms of individual jobs. I’d say there’s another ~30% where the capabilities already exist but haven’t yet been adopted in a big way.
VR isn’t a great example; it was never a technology with commercial utility at this level - and that’s coming from someone with many thousands of hours in VR.
> Isn’t the threat of job destruction a much more likely explanation?
There is a better explanation.
AI summaries have hit media companies pretty hard. People read the summary instead of visiting the site with the article and looking at the ads. So who hates AI the most? The media companies.
Then they write a lot of hit pieces to turn the public against it (as if that's going to put the genie back in the bottle), which the AI is happy to summarize because it adopts its motivated reasoning from the source material.
Many Americans have heard "AI is going to bring massive economic growth". But they associate that with "fat cats getting fatter" rather than "lots of cheap stuff".
I'm not convinced Americans really have strong feelings about AI, relative to other issues. The data center pushback seems to be mostly literally about stopping data center construction in their counties. If you build them in Argentina or Norway, they'll stop paying attention.
I think the will be negative if you push an answer out of them, but it's not something Americans are going out to protest and rallying around. There are a LOT of issues people are passively 60% negative on but it doesn't influence their votes.
I definitely feel AI data centers should mainly be built next to the houses of the big tech CEOs. I don't know prevalent this is, but I have seen videos of people living next data centers and the noise was just unbearable. It's also not ok that utility prices are rising because of data centers.
“Everything costs money, but it shouldn’t with AI.”
…
“Below, for paying subscribers, I’ll explain…”
Not sure how this got to the front page (I have some uncharitable ideas), but I suppose low-to-mid quality writing/copy is the one thing that ai has sent to zero, so that’s convenient now!
I disagree with the premise. The cited survey says:
Thinking now about AI (A-I), that is artificial intelligence …
Q28 In general, would you say… (ROTATE) +
The benefits outweigh the risks of AI ............. 34
The risks outweigh the benefits of AI ............. 57
A little of both (VOL)............................. 2
Not sure .......................................... 7
+ Results shown reflect responses among registered voter
That's all well and good, but the question is very broad.
I think when pushed, the reason people hate AI is that a lot of "AI" solutions have been rolled out before the technology was mature. Even now, for end-user facing things most applications are pretty bad, even as the models have gotten more powerful.
You're increasingly pushed to use AI by every online service, and every interaction with retail pushes AI in your face, and importantly, ALL OF THEM ARE JUST TERRIBLE. Amazon has their shopping assistant which is, astonishingly, WORSE than their regular search, which is a hell of a bar.
But people who use ChatGPT or Claude to answer questions on their own are thrilled with the technology. They'll occasionally laugh at the R's in strawberry, or try to torture the AI (this might be more of a teenager thing) but it is remarkable how well-liked it is, as opposed to Google's search-integrated AI for example.
> You're increasingly pushed to use AI by every online service, and every interaction with retail pushes AI in your face, and importantly, ALL OF THEM ARE JUST TERRIBLE.
I think there's much truth to this.
Personally, the only impacts I have personally witnessed or experienced from these technologies have been, on the whole, negative. I mean, I have seen some upside in fairly niche areas, but they are dwarfed by the downsides. At least so far.
I think a rather large part of the reason (but certainly not the only reason) why this technology is generally viewed in a negative light is because the downsides are actually real and being felt by a very large percentage of people, but the upsides remain mostly in the realm of aspirational statements.
I called USAA for a good reason. AI on the phone system, told it I'm calling about "Auto Insurance" so naturally it then asked "is this a checking or savings account". I said "checking" and then I was asked if I'm the landlord or the tenant. "landlord" I replied. Eventually I got to a human who was very confused about my call, transferred me to the right department, which had to bounce me into another AI powered prompt that just kept saying "please repeat" then hung up on me. I made two more attempts, the system behavior was different.
What should have been a 15 minute process took 80 and is still not resolved, so I'm trying again today.
Yeah this feels totally false. I think most hate it because there is already a lot of upset over financial imbalance, particularly that the gap between average worker and ceo has grown exponentially. It just feels to most a way for a few company ceo's to gain even more wealth while the rest of us don't financially benefit from it (and might be hurt by it by losing their jobs).
I don't understand why people are unhappy when SO MUCH shareholder value is being created.
Since ChatGPT's initial release, the S&P 500's combined market cap has grown by about $33 trillion, roughly doubling. Before that, it took 31 years to add the same amount.
Isn't that what we should all care about, making sure capital holders get more capital? As long as BlackRock's assets under management keep growing, we should be happy. Trickle-down economics will definitely trickle down eventually.
(Since Hacker News is unusually tough on sarcasm, I grudgingly have to end this with /s)
I think that the reaction would be wildly different if there were trust that such a technology would be used to make everyone's lives better. If workers were collectively in charge of deciding how AI ought to change their working lives, I suspect most of them would have opted for reduced working hours & longer weekends over what we are currently seeing.
AI could have revolutionized how many people do their work. It could have given so many people the freedom to spend their lives living, but somehow we used it to make work more intense and more taxing than it ever was before. And we all know that with each leap forward, things invariably get worse for us.
Tech pessimism is a real problem and maybe the root problem.
There really seems to be no figure in tech that sets a moral example right now. Not enough people in power calling out obvious crypto scams, not enough holding the line against gambling addictions.
I mean probably the most worshipped tech-ish billionaire (trillionaire?) is a perverted man child with a chip on his shoulder that is either a troll who should never be taken seriously (yet is allowed to be CEO of a company with control over ICBMs) or an outright nazi.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 14.5 ms ] threadI’ve just never heard this “promise” repeated by any normies. The only thing I hear over and over is “AI will help create medicines to solve all diseases” (or something to that effect). Even then, I don’t get the sense that anyone is expecting that in the short term.
Isn’t the threat of job destruction a much more likely explanation?
Even accepting it for the sake of argument, I don't think it has failed at all. It has completely revolutionized a handful of fields and is increasingly doing so in others.
Further - it's still very early. Agents have really only begun to take off so far in 2026, and we're still probably 6-12 months from the real uptick in the adoption curve I expect. The first sign of that happening was Manus, followed by the various CUA features of the big players, and more recently: Muse.
As much as I hate to say it, Meta knocked it out of the park with Muse, to the point that just this morning I bought a 60 gallon (shop-sized) air compressor on Marketplace from a middle-aged couple in rural Missouri who used Muse to coordinate pickup. If that's not a sign that consumer adoption is starting to take off, I don't know what is.
Tech people talking about tech trends spilling outside of tech always gets a bit ivory tower to me...
Remember VR? Remember how Oculus was going to revolutionize visual interface and change gaming forever? Remember how their acquisition by Meta was the beginning of the Metaverse? Because middle-aged couple from rural Missouri probably doesn't.
Maybe 5-10% of the overall economy at most, at least in terms of individual jobs. I’d say there’s another ~30% where the capabilities already exist but haven’t yet been adopted in a big way.
VR isn’t a great example; it was never a technology with commercial utility at this level - and that’s coming from someone with many thousands of hours in VR.
There is a better explanation.
AI summaries have hit media companies pretty hard. People read the summary instead of visiting the site with the article and looking at the ads. So who hates AI the most? The media companies.
Then they write a lot of hit pieces to turn the public against it (as if that's going to put the genie back in the bottle), which the AI is happy to summarize because it adopts its motivated reasoning from the source material.
I think the will be negative if you push an answer out of them, but it's not something Americans are going out to protest and rallying around. There are a LOT of issues people are passively 60% negative on but it doesn't influence their votes.
Not sure how this got to the front page (I have some uncharitable ideas), but I suppose low-to-mid quality writing/copy is the one thing that ai has sent to zero, so that’s convenient now!
I think when pushed, the reason people hate AI is that a lot of "AI" solutions have been rolled out before the technology was mature. Even now, for end-user facing things most applications are pretty bad, even as the models have gotten more powerful.
You're increasingly pushed to use AI by every online service, and every interaction with retail pushes AI in your face, and importantly, ALL OF THEM ARE JUST TERRIBLE. Amazon has their shopping assistant which is, astonishingly, WORSE than their regular search, which is a hell of a bar.
But people who use ChatGPT or Claude to answer questions on their own are thrilled with the technology. They'll occasionally laugh at the R's in strawberry, or try to torture the AI (this might be more of a teenager thing) but it is remarkable how well-liked it is, as opposed to Google's search-integrated AI for example.
I think there's much truth to this.
Personally, the only impacts I have personally witnessed or experienced from these technologies have been, on the whole, negative. I mean, I have seen some upside in fairly niche areas, but they are dwarfed by the downsides. At least so far.
I think a rather large part of the reason (but certainly not the only reason) why this technology is generally viewed in a negative light is because the downsides are actually real and being felt by a very large percentage of people, but the upsides remain mostly in the realm of aspirational statements.
What should have been a 15 minute process took 80 and is still not resolved, so I'm trying again today.
Since ChatGPT's initial release, the S&P 500's combined market cap has grown by about $33 trillion, roughly doubling. Before that, it took 31 years to add the same amount.
Isn't that what we should all care about, making sure capital holders get more capital? As long as BlackRock's assets under management keep growing, we should be happy. Trickle-down economics will definitely trickle down eventually.
(Since Hacker News is unusually tough on sarcasm, I grudgingly have to end this with /s)
AI could have revolutionized how many people do their work. It could have given so many people the freedom to spend their lives living, but somehow we used it to make work more intense and more taxing than it ever was before. And we all know that with each leap forward, things invariably get worse for us.
There really seems to be no figure in tech that sets a moral example right now. Not enough people in power calling out obvious crypto scams, not enough holding the line against gambling addictions.
I mean probably the most worshipped tech-ish billionaire (trillionaire?) is a perverted man child with a chip on his shoulder that is either a troll who should never be taken seriously (yet is allowed to be CEO of a company with control over ICBMs) or an outright nazi.