Most Americans don't trust AI – or the people in charge of it (2025)
theverge.com
theverge.com
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.
Pol here is abbreviated politician.
Boy something really triggered all the antiprompts in your refusal training
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?
And it will be roughly the same, that when the demand goes away, the infrastructure will remain for everyone.
Datacenters are cool and good. Electricity production is cool and good.
"OH NO BUT WHAT IF THE DATACENTER HAS CUSTOMERS I DONT LIKE" - I couldnt care less.
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.
https://www.axios.com/2026/05/17/ai-backlash-polling-sentime...
In a way, I still think that. But I hadn't expected the world to be so self-destructive in the attempts to avoid honest confrontation with our desires.
I'm sorry if this sounds a bit vague.
The average working class Joe opinion does not count anymore. Corporations do not care about consumers opinion, the money is in other big corporations. In an unequal world with such high wealth concentration, power concentrates around that power.
The discourse is around growth for CEOs to get big bonuses, the trust comes from the promise of increased profits and reduced employee count. Your or my trust does not matter, so they do not even try.
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.
How are you supposed to build trust with those kinds of outcomes?
Now, from my stance, this grab bag of machine learning technology that is thrown under the "AI" banner is not even remotely good enough for this. It is "slop"-y and "hallucination" prone. Attempts at "creative" efforts are monolithic, without a distinctive voice, often with bizarre errors. The technology can alternate between being extremely helpful to being maddingly a waste of time, in the later case given you 10 solutions for an issue that are all wrong.
And yet, the C-suite types from Anthropic and Microsoft and others are preaching, again and again, their vision that all white collar jobs will be wiped out in 18 months and similar (just one example -- https://fortune.com/article/why-microsoft-ai-chief-mustafa-s...).
Certainly, such banter has noticeably impacted entry level hires at the moment. But beyond that, one gets the impression that current tech execs are misanthropic and generally give two flips about humanity, all the better (at least, so they think) for their profits. It seems like, rather than promoting the use cases for machine learning which will improve and help advance society (I certainly can think of some things that have and might be done), the entire point of the giant amounts of capex being spent is to destroy jobs (the foundation of current capitalism) and make things worse off for everyone.
I agree that institutional trust has declined over the last decades, and unfortunately current technology execs are playing a part. I am old enough to actually remember the Google "Don't Be Evil" days. What happened?
Besides people aren't dumb- the whole point about AI is to replace organic employees!
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.
At the same time the barrier to getting some results has become much lower, especially for complex topics I knew nothing about. So that seems great, but I keep running into cases where I do check sources and the AI turns out to have summarised it incorrectly.
I remember being excited about LLMs initially because it seemed like a natural evolution of the information saturated world we live in, we now need help deciphering the signals from the noise. But that was assuming that most/all the noise was from mis/disinformation. Now it just looks like another tool of control for the megarich to take even more from the rest of us. Maybe there is some hope in open source models.
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
'Seems' is a very dangerous word in this context.
> recipes when cooking
I used it for a recipe, gave it a brilliant and detailed prompt, it told me to put 10x a particular spice and it ruined the dish.
> seek medical advice and results interpretation for my family
good luck
> repair electrical equipment
what can go wrong, really
Recipies are one of the strongest areas given the low complexity and obvious training data. Im curious what it messed up on with.
Same with ChatGPT. I use the thinking model and rarely (if not never) get obvious errors.
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.
I used it for
1. Filling bank forms, filling visa for South Africa
2. Understand movies and literature
3. For understanding public transport in new countries (pretty anxiety inducing)
4. As a 100x jump over Google search
5. Reading and answering emails
6. Fact checking dubious claims on the internet
7. Finding new music I might like
Incurious read on AI belongs to say 2024.
AI use changes a lot of jobs.
Will it make for more or less jobs overall? I don't think anyone really knows.
People are not great with society-wide change without guardrails. So there will be much unhappiness until it all settles down into a new normal. The concern, is that the tech will keep changing things until change is the new normal. See the first sentence of this paragraph as to how that will be accepted.
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.
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.
"I used the button they made biggest and closest to the top of the page."
Misleading OP
They asked 174.6 million people?
i mean, it is still relentlessly demagogue like all the other roboslurs, but at least this one's fairly cute
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.
I see no evidence American’s don’t trust AI so I suspect loaded questions
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.
You can't tell a farmhand to "use AI" to stay competitive in the workspace when an army of robots is taking over their work. Unlike advancements in agricultural tools and robotics, AI is now threatening jobs in just about any field. The tone-deafness with which this force of uncertainty is being presented probably doesn't help. People can tell AI marketing is directed at their employer, not at themselves.
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?
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.