We're Missing a Key Reason Why Americans Hate AI

We're Missing a Key Reason Why Americans Hate AI derekthompson.org

AI’s prophets predicted cheap abundance. The AI buildout has delivered the opposite.

14 points•abe94•about 3 hours ago•27 comments•

#ai #reason #key #missing #hate #americans #americans hate #key reason

27 comments

JSR_FDEDabout 2 hours ago

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?

seeingnatureabout 1 hour ago

I agree that I hear the threat of job destruction or 'they scraped the entire web stealing everything and are trying to charge us for re-packaging it for us' argument more than I hear that AI will bring abundance.

watwutabout 1 hour ago

I did not even heard that one. I heard that it will make everyone unemployed, already made "humans obsolete" and then I heard some dystopian visions ... literally from industry leaders. And then I found out other industry leaders literally WANT that dystopia to happen.

bryanlarsenabout 1 hour ago

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".

AnthonyMouseabout 1 hour ago

> 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.

moateabout 1 hour ago

I'm friends with a lot of creatives and artists. We all genuinely hate the plagiarism machine because 1- it's a plagiarism machine 2- it's killing creative jobs 3- it makes bad "art" and 4- it's killing jobs.

I don't think people need to be convinced that "this job-stealing robot that makes trash and accelerates climate destruction faster than the internet was already doing" by hit pieces, plenty of us are just proud Luddites (now if you want to talk about hit pieces, that's a movement that got decimated by bad PR)

Ancapistaniabout 1 hour ago

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.

JohnFenabout 1 hour ago

> It has completely revolutionized a handful of fields and is increasingly doing so in others.

It's also good to remember that "revolutionizing" or "disrupting" a thing does not necessarily mean (or imply, outside of SV) that the results will be better.

andrewlaabout 1 hour ago

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.

JohnFenabout 1 hour ago

> 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.

edoceoabout 1 hour ago

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.

SoftTalkerabout 1 hour ago

People see AI used to maximize prices and profits, not make life any better for individuals or make life more affordable. Businesses have always tried to do this of course but with AI it's like a superpower. They enable landlords to find the optimal rents and vacancies to maximize their profits. They enable medical clinics to determine that 2.3 minutes is the optimal time for a doctor to spend with a patient. They enable McDonald's to find the optimal price for Big Macs in the local area. Individuals see AI squeezing them for every spare penny in their budget but don't see AI offering them any similar benefits like this (because there's no money to be made doing that).

kimbernatorabout 1 hour ago

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.

austinthetacoabout 1 hour ago

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).

exogenyabout 2 hours ago

This isn't rocket science. People are worried about their jobs, while the top 1% is getting richer and richer and richer.

vjvjvjvjghvabout 1 hour ago

Exactly. It's hard to get excited about a technology that in theory could provide huge benefits for all, but because of our economic system there is a good chance that the majority of the benefits go to a few and many people will actually be losers.

I am believing more that with advances in AI and then also robotics the capitalist system as we know it will break. The question is what comes next.

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