What we have is, while useful for many things (with proper constraints), just prediction engines that behave like intelligence. Generating a sentence when specifically asked to do so is a far cry from independently pondering over your existence then picking up the God of Thunder's hammer.
If anything, the public has been primed to hate AI as we have it now. CEOs are blaming it for mass scale layoffs. Media executives are using it so recklessly they face legal action. Data centers (already an issue for years for environmental impact and noise pollution) are being even more aggressively pushed on communities who don't want them. And the Silicon Valley upper crust are, to sell their AI products, embracing the worst views and uses of them.
AI can be ethical and useful, if we want it to be. But that is not how it is being sold. Increasingly, the public is aligning against it's use. This blog post badly misses that point.