We're Missing a Key Reason Why Americans Hate AI | Hacker News Reader

We're Missing a Key Reason Why Americans Hate AI

derekthompson.org

16 pointsabe9434 comments

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 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.

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.

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".

> 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.

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)

> 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.

Three of these are what I said to begin with (people consume the AI output instead of patronizing the source) and the fourth is that the quality of the output sucks, which is the part they're actually improving over time -- but that's going to make the first problem worse.

> 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

Then why are there so many hit pieces?

Obvious example, the primary legitimate criticism of data centers is when they continuously operate a gas turbine, but a) most of them don't actually do that, and b) all the same issues are present whenever anyone operates a gas turbine for any other reason, so why is it an article about data centers instead of an article about gas turbines? Why are there articles about data center water use in regions where there isn't significant water scarcity to begin with and data centers aren't the primary consumers of water anyway?

Likewise, if you actually want to improve the situation then the proposals should be to e.g. get data centers (along with everyone else) to stop using fossil fuels to generate electricity, but instead the proposals are to ban data centers even if they source their electricity from solar/wind/nuclear/hydro.

Those are the differences that make something a hit piece.

>>Three of these are what I said to begin with (people consume the AI output instead of patronizing the source) and the fourth is that the quality of the output sucks, which is the part they're actually improving over time -- but that's going to make the first problem worse.

What? The art is not "improving" it's "different". Also, as slop output increases, the models train on more slop. GIGO doesn't seem like it can fix itself if you just robot-centipede it.

Why so many hit pieces? Because public sentiment and media protectionism align. Your original post seems to be arguing a "wag-the-dog situation", when this is more of a "arm the insurgents" situation imo. Why are there so many people upset about AI data centers when data centers have been around for decades? Idk, go look at the buildout rate and tell me if you notice anything in the trend line changing around the time of AI rollout. And it's not just burning fossil fuels, they also require tons of construction and water usage.

And again, some people just hate AI. Full Stop. There is nothing good about it to those people. Hell, I barely think the internet was a net good, so trying to tell me that AI is anything other than a capitalist fever dream to finally replace knowledge workers is going to be a hard sell. This isn't because I'm technologically illiterate or incapable of critically reading an article. Also, plenty of people are using the data centers as radicalizing topic to get people to...stop using fossil fuels to generate electricity.

Your stated thesis was "the better explanation is that the media is out to kill AI/Data centers" and I think misunderstanding how little people outside the tech world actually want AI (you're not alone obviously, it's why we're in this bubble in the first place).

Except that media hyped ai. They did not wrote hit pieces. Altman and Amidei wrote hit pieces.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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 think it's more likely to be the obvious and straightforward reasons that people say out loud, constantly, everywhere.

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

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.

cost of living is bc of high price of energy

> cost of living is bc of high price of energy

That's a small part of it. The largest part of rising costs is mismanagement of the economy, in the past via inflationary debt plus runaway national debt, and the present overspending while kicking the can by borrowing more. The fed has lost control of the economy through rate locks freezing home prices, while inflationary forces drive them higher, and the hyper-consolidation of wealth while minimum wage sits under 10$ an hour. This is ripe for a societal collapse in the next few decades.

AI is funded by the consolidated wealth, ofc, so it dovetails as a scapegoat.

yeah, and its happening in every country, but a lot of ppl make it feel like its just here

if AI performed as advertised and wasnt just a mildly useful (& addictive) tool thats been hyped up beyond belief it would still be exerting a deflationary pressure on the economy which would compensate for increasing energy prices.

AI might be putting deflationary pressure on services. But as of now it has only increased the price of commodities like RAM modules.

oh dont think it's done anything the bring down the cost of services and it won't.

95+% of the companies throwing AI at problems have problems which can't be solved with AI.

even where it helps it's usually just duck tape wrapped around badly implemented IT systems.

“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'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.

Strawman. It’s very obvious that people are frustrated by the combination of no perceived benefit with all kinds of perceived risks and downsides.

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.

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)

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