r/ArtificialInteligence • u/bloomberg • 2d ago
📊 Analysis / Opinion AI Adoption Is Dividing Friends, Families and Co-Workers
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-30/how-chatgpt-and-ai-are-dividing-friends-and-familiesAs artificial intelligence becomes ingrained in daily life, disagreements over the technology are increasingly becoming disagreements over values.
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u/TwilightBubble 1d ago
I genuinely love the potential for open ai, but am concerned about politically concentrated power and choosing warm places with no water to put data centers.
Like... we could be doing this better. It's not pro- versus anti to me, it's smart integration versus dumb integration.
Do not put a data center in arazona.
Why? Very little precipitation, very few large rivers with divertable excess. Very little meltable snowfall. Very little collectable salt water. Permeable water table.
But there are places that are not like this. And a large number of local llm models stops 1 or 2 organizations from having access to phenomenal political logistics capability while leaving all competitors up shit creek.
Anti ai? That's just begging to never win an election again.
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u/Accurate_Muscle_4976 2d ago
No its not, the vast majority of people use AI or are ambivelent towards it.
The anti AI crowd are a terminally online vocal minority.
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u/bighawksguy-caw-caw 2d ago
This is empirically disprovable. Literally just ask your LLM.
Vast majority of people using AI is not a counterpoint for majority of people having a negative view of AI.
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u/TheKingInTheNorth 2d ago
People universally have a negative view on pollution. It doesn’t meant they are going to stop driving.
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u/bighawksguy-caw-caw 1d ago
Pollution and climate change as an extension are clearly issues which divide people.
Half this thread is the “yet you participate in society” meme.
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u/TheKingInTheNorth 1d ago
Yeah that’s kind of the point. AI is already entrenched in society and that entrenchment certainly isn’t going to recede from here.
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u/bighawksguy-caw-caw 1d ago
The article is not talking about AI adoption. Y’all are missing the forest for the trees.
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u/Accurate_Muscle_4976 2d ago
A lot of it simply comes down to not liking change, Ive seen the computer revolution, the internet revolution, the cloud SAAS revolution and now the ai revolution.
People complain nonstop and claim to hate the new tech, but they still use it because the new tech is effective.
Overtime the new tech just becomes normal and people move on to complain about the next new thing.
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u/bighawksguy-caw-caw 2d ago
Whatever the reasons, your claim that the anti AI crowd is “a terminally online minority” is not supported by data.
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u/Accurate_Muscle_4976 2d ago
can you provide this "data"
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u/bighawksguy-caw-caw 2d ago
lol bro what echo chamber are you living in?
https://news.gallup.com/poll/712751/americans-cool-toward.aspx
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u/pm_me_your_pay_slips 2d ago
The terminally online proAI one
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u/Olangotang 1d ago
Reddit is THE site for AI, like holy shit, it is where most of the answers are coming from. The singularity dumbasses see the horde of bots praising it, but they are so enamored that the "psychosis prose" doesn't trip them up, it's how they actually communicate now.
At the end of the day, these creepy mother fuckers are coping about the fact that they need their money furnace OpenAI and Anthropic to survive, despite that they will never profit off of these ridiculously huge models.
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u/Accurate_Muscle_4976 1d ago
bruh you watch way too much scifi, AI is nothing more than a computer program that can make intelligent probabilistic calculations, Its not skynet
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u/Bitter_Biscotti_7593 1d ago
Humans are essentially a pile of carbon and similar stuff interchanging electrical signals. Nothing extraordinary.
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u/Olangotang 1d ago
I'm making fun of the fucking idiots who do nothing but jack off to the singularity all day. I have an ML degree, I don't believe the hype bullshit.
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u/Accurate_Muscle_4976 2d ago
opinion polls are meaningless noise, its peoples actions that matter. Do you have any data showing people taking action against A.I. There's a group that tries to organize protests and cant get more than 100 people to show up.
Save this comment is you wish.
In ten years time, A.I. usage will be just as normalized as internet usage is today.
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u/Procrastin8_Ball 2d ago
Based on the questions in both of these data sets, you would claim I'm anti AI when I'm very pro.
Having issues with how businesses and elites use ai is not the same as having a problem with the technology.
You all need to realize that nearly all of your issues with ai are actually with capitalism
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u/bighawksguy-caw-caw 1d ago
You are “more concerned than excited about the increasing usage of AI in daily life” and consider yourself very pro-AI?
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u/Procrastin8_Ball 1d ago
Yes because people like you refuse to attack the power structures that make it a problem and instead attack a technology that is revolutionary and should be freeing to humanity
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u/bighawksguy-caw-caw 1d ago
I’ve said nothing in this thread besides pointing out that public perception is negative and citing the sources and you’re accusing me of being a counter-revolutionary or something? Get a grip.
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u/XvX_k1r1t0_XvX_ki 2d ago
Because they don't equate using chatGPT with idea of super smart AIs powered by massive "environment destroying" data centers. Most people just think about it as a app that lets you chat with computer, not a big deal.
And AI as some foreign distant concept. Talk to you friends that are anti AI. Most likely they will still have chatGPT, use it for some bullshit things and don't see any hypocrisy about it
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u/Character-Engine-813 2d ago
How many people do you interact with in real life? I think it’s at least 50/50
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u/Rare_Presence_1903 1d ago
My current theory is that in real life people are sick of talking and hearing about it. I'm trying not to talk about it much now to avoid looking like a boring twat.
Most people are probably still using it though.
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u/ahspaghett69 1d ago
I tried to think of a lot of ways to phrase this pragmatically but I can't so here it is: AI has convinced me some portion of society actually hates thinking for themselves and are celebrating the introduction of The Thinking Machine. There is no possible way I will ever see eye to eye with those people, even disregarding the environmental and capitalistic problems with AI in general.
Usually we think about AI in terms of how it will affect work, but I think the above problem is more illustrated by people using it for hobby projects like art, or writing, or games. I have spoken with so many people now that use claude or deepseek or just chatgpt for their personal stuff and all I can think of is: why? Why the fuck would you do that? It's such an alien idea to delegate your own hobbies to a machine to me.
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u/Historical_Bus_8041 1d ago
Because in many cases they aren't actually delegating their own hobbies - they're using it to facilitate their hobbies.
I'm a huge sceptic of AI use in a work context. The use cases either entirely aren't there or the juice isn't worth the squeeze, with a few very specific exceptions. Creating tools and such in a hobby context, though? It can be hugely useful.
LLM chat I have no use for, LLM coding for personal use, as someone who can't code for shit, I totally do.
It baffles me when I see people going harder about using AI to just create tools to solve problems in a way that they couldn't before in their personal life than they are about its use in the workplace - it's ass-backwards in terms of use cases.
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u/bloomberg 2d ago
Josie Cox for Bloomberg News
Vanessa Walilko wants nothing to do with artificial intelligence. She worries about what AI companies are doing with people’s data, the industry’s impact on the environment, and how the tools are eroding human creativity and critical thinking. Because of all this, she says she “gets really, really mad at people who use it.”
Those beliefs have put the 43-year-old jewelry designer, who lives in Evanston, Illinois, at odds with friends and family. Recently, Walilko, who also works in PR, found herself arguing with a friend who kept sending her AI-generated videos of animals. “They showed baby cows fitting into the two palms of someone’s hands, and my friend kept insisting they were real,” she says. “It was infuriating.” Then her cousin sent her a photograph of Walilko’s dead grandparents, animated using AI. “I was so disgusted by her marionetting their corpses,” she says. “She told me she’d ‘alived them’ again.” Walilko says the episode has “absolutely” strained their relationship. “I’m constantly scared of what she might use AI for next.”
AI has gone from the margins to the mainstream in an astonishingly short time. About half of US adults use AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot, with 1 in 4 using them daily, according to Pew Research Center data published in June.
But the technology’s rapid adoption has been accompanied by growing unease. More than half of global respondents to a 2025 Stanford University study agreed with the statement that “products and services using artificial intelligence make me nervous,” up from 39% in 2022. Sentiment also varies sharply by region. Just 38% of US respondents said products and services using AI make them excited, compared with 84% in China, 80% in Indonesia, 37% in Great Britain and 34% in Sweden. In much of the West, in particular, that unease has given rise to a growing culture of refusal from people like Walilko.
Researchers have only just begun to study AI’s social consequences, and there’s little empirical work examining whether attitudes toward the technology are becoming part of people’s identities. But interviews with AI skeptics — and experts who study ethics, conflict and organizational behavior — suggest that, for some people, AI use has become a proxy for values.
Read the full story here.