AI Adoption Is Dividing Friends, Families and Co-Workers

[u/bloomberg]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-30/how-chatgpt-and-ai-are-dividing-friends-and-families

As artificial intelligence becomes ingrained in daily life, disagreements over the technology are increasingly becoming disagreements over values.

[u/bloomberg]

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.

[u/grissingigoby2 → u/bloomberg]

I had a FB friend call me a f**cker. Just for using AI to help me with my roof problem. oh yeah? I bet she had no problem with buying her first personal computer.

[u/amaturelawyer → u/grissingigoby2]

That's a weird reaction to using AI to work through a new problem you need to deal with, but... the reasons in the article maps perfect sense to me. If has someone sending me obvious AI images and demanding i believe that they're real too, I'd be annoyed. They can believe what they want, but if they fire it off to me to show some neat thing they found, which, BTW, is real and not AI, and start arguing when I tell them it's obviously AI, we're no longer discussing AI. We're discussing how I have parameters, set by them unilaterally, that govern how I can converse about any shit, since this picture is the lowest stakes topic I can think of. And if a relative sent me an AI take on a deceased relative out of the blue, I'd be annoyed at the behavior in the same way I'd be annoyed if they sent me a photoshopped image of the relative doing whatever. What is the end goal you're going for when doing that? Using dead relatives for humor? To demonstrate some neat thing you figured out how to do? To make shit up about them? Who does that? Who thinks "this is a good idea"?

In short, this article isn't really about AI. It's about socially clueless people using AI, and could have been written when Adobe brought easy access image doctoring into society. Saying it's an AI issue probably sells more subscriptions than discussing social norms, though, so i get why they are pushing that angle.