1. People are naturally scared of major change.
2. AI has been pretty aggressively thrust on people, whether they like it or not.
3. There is a legitimate concern about widespread job loss, some companies have already claimed AI is the reason for mass layoffs.
4. Deepfakes, scams, cyber security risks, people AI psychosis or using it to commit suicide, etc - no doubt none of this helps with general public opinion.
5. Cannibalisation of the rest of the economy, e.g. RAM and GPU prices making gaming machines unaffordable, non-AI startups unable to get funding in this environment.
6. Hype fatigue - we've recently been through this with crypto.
So to me the evidence points to anti-AI sentiment being more of a reactionary response to the current status quo, rather than some proactive effort to negate the technology.