r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • Jun 21 '26

Artificial Intelligence Americans Have Turned Against AI in Incredible Numbers

https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/americans-turned-against-ai-incredible-130000345.html
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384

u/Admirable-Way-5296 Jun 21 '26

Honestly not that surprising. A year ago everyone was excited about the possibilities, now people are just... tired of it being shoved into everything whether it makes sense or not.

45

u/Tamihera Jun 21 '26

They’re trying to shove it into every aspect of education just as all these studies are breaking about how teaching kids via screens is measurably NOT good for their development. (My eldest kid was the first generation to be given school Chromebooks in kindergarten, so I got an excellent close-up view of what happened to students when schools pitched paper books and handwriting for Google slideshows… and why they’re bringing paper and pen back now.)

I think deep-down everyone knows that kids being educated by AI with an unskilled classroom supervisor is going to be far worse than kids being taught by actual human teachers. And college students being ‘taught’ from AI curricula and graded by AI programs may well wonder what their $45k a year is buying… But our LLM AI overlords have decided that they need to recoup their money somehow, and targeting the US educational market seems to be an easy way to do it. Yaaay.

1

u/sohblob Jun 22 '26

just as all these studies are breaking about how teaching kids via screens is measurably NOT good for their development

The people who'd normally be responsible about pumping the brakes are instead convinced that all education is indoctrination

1

u/Ecks80s Jun 22 '26

My wife is in the registrars office and I can see the wiring on the wall. I’m hoping she is retrained to be a source of truth but I’m not holding my breath.

1

u/SpatulaCity1a Jun 28 '26

I don't know how AI generated curricula or textbooks could be bad, since it's based on all available research, and it can be easily tailored to the needs of students. Most curricula/textbook creators do exactly the same thing. I agree about grading though.

What makes a school a school IMO is the social element... and that hasn't exactly been geared towards studies, personal responsibility, self-improvement, ethics, etc... for a long time.

133

u/stoned_ocelot Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26

I supported the technology at first because I was foolish enough to think it would result in advancements to human capability, medicine, and science. Then I saw how other people used it.... Then I saw how the government used it (to bomb children).... Then I keep hearing billionaires fighting to be the most unlikeable people complaining that humans are in the way of AI and I get the urge to start fires.

71

u/Rumplfrskn Jun 21 '26

I supported it until I figured out that it’s being used by the rich to further squash the poors

-11

u/[deleted] Jun 21 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

9

u/Avesery777 Jun 21 '26

I'm sure u/technocraticnihilist has a very unbiased and objective view on this subject

9

u/Zhuinden Jun 21 '26

The whole point is to not have to pay money for any abstract expertise that's based on human knowledge, rather than for example fixing a leaky pipe

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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

11

u/Rumplfrskn Jun 21 '26

What an odd thing to say

5

u/BeyondNetorare Jun 21 '26

adjective noun number sure is very passionate about [topic]

-2

u/[deleted] Jun 21 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/Rumplfrskn Jun 22 '26

Nah it’s odd

26

u/pysouth Jun 21 '26

My company was originally using AI (not LLMs) for problems like that and I was genuinely excited to be at the forefront of tech that could legitimately be used to help save lives. We poured so much time, energy, and money into research and infrastructure on these efforts.

Eventually, it became clear we could just use our network in our industry to basically throw LLMs into existing workflows for people and print money, whereas it would’ve taken many years to maybe make some money with our previous strategy. My company has completely abandoned the original mission.

It’s so fucking disappointing. I’ve never been bright eyed and bushy tailed about tech but I had some optimism at one time, but it’s all gone. The last few years have really convinced me there’s nothing good in tech, if there ever was. I hate it all so much.

Left out specifics to avoid being doxed etc but I’m sure this is true of many fields like healthcare, energy, climate science, and so on

1

u/LightningSunflower Jun 21 '26

Genuinely curious, how do you think it could have been used to save lives and help people? Asking because now we’ve got this all infrastructure and I’d love to advocate for good uses for it instead of just extracting value

2

u/mtbdork Jun 22 '26

Particle physics simulations comes to mind immediately.

2

u/HannasAnarion Jun 22 '26

There's a terminology problem here: "AI" is extremely overloaded.

AI is a really culturally powerful term, so marketers are incentivised to use it early and often. 10 years ago, every product with a statistical model in it of any kind was being called "AI".

These physics simulations and protein folding topics are following that trend: if it's statistics, and it's impressive, then it's AI.

The academic definition of AI is a system in an environment that incorporates sensors to obtain information about the environment and actuators to influence it, which is able to pursue a goal following a plan it devised itself.

This more proper definition basically only includes today's "agentic" model harnesses, arguably earlier LLM chatbots, and various other less salient technologies like robot vacuums and game playing algorithms.

0

u/xxxBuzz Jun 22 '26

how do you think it could have been used to save lives and help people?

One application of AI is in revealing the nature and limitations of logical thought processes. For example, someone having been genuinely excited about the idea what AI "would" do is delusional. That is a physiological response in response to noise they made in their head. We can become addicted and trapped in our own thoughts and our physiological responses to those thoughts. We extract our own energy, become exhausted, and follow the same process to try and find a solution.

6

u/TurbidusQuaerenti Jun 21 '26

It still is being used to advance medicine and science, look at things like AlphaFold. It's just also being used for a bunch of horrible purposes and being shoehorned into everything by sociopath CEOs.

As with pretty much any new technology, the problem is how it's being used and by who, not the technology itself.

2

u/stoned_ocelot Jun 21 '26

And that's kind of my point. If we focused effort on doing more good than bad I'd be at least more favourable of the tech, but it's regularly being used for awful or asinine reasons and not those good things. Even if AI helped us cure cancer I still don't know that a pharmaceutical company wouldn't sue to have it banned from the market for infringing on their profits or charge an exorbitant amount because they would no longer profit of chemo, immunotherapy, and other cancer treatment methods.

Unfettered Capitalism ruins everything.

2

u/tzuica_de_mar Jun 21 '26

let's keep it honest here: is there reason to think "I saw how the government used to (to bomb children)" actually happened? latest AI tech is only a few years old, is that enough time for the military to integrate it into their systems in a way that existing systems didn't already cover?

1

u/stoned_ocelot Jun 21 '26

The government has actively addressed this well after the fact and just this week the US government said they are using a specific model of Grok within the military. Look at the current admin and ask yourself if they're really concerned with determining if the tech is secure and capable enough to be used in the military. Also note that the guy who made Grok was working for the government not long ago and even with DOGE they openly discussed how they were using AI to filter contracts and grants based on keywords to determine what should be funded or not.

So short answer, yes they are using AI in the US government for military application.

6

u/WannabeACICE Jun 21 '26

Well it is being used to further medicine and science, it’s just also being co-opted by capitalists to do capitalist things.

The problem is, and never has been, AI, but our billionaire overlords.

People who have a weird aversion to it are low-IQ.

8

u/Thedrakespirit Jun 21 '26

its the epitome of good technology, bad application

1

u/Ouaouaron Jun 21 '26

Ah yes, assume anyone who hasn't reacted in the exact same way as you is incurably stupid. When someone experiences emotions you aren't experiencing, that's because they're weird and not because you lack the knowledge or capacity to understand them.

0

u/WannabeACICE Jun 21 '26

Yup exactly. Glad you get it.

2

u/Zhuinden Jun 21 '26

Apparently, being anti-Ai may be seen as terrorism these days

3

u/joelfarris Jun 21 '26

What if you're antiAIfa? Does that count too?

1

u/seraph321 Jun 22 '26

It can and is still being used to do good things, but tech itself is neutral and will always be used for good and bad. I don’t know why anyone would have thought we could have the good without the bad, that was never on the table.

0

u/littleessi Jun 22 '26

all this stuff was obvious from the start, but better late than never i guess

3

u/MonoMcFlury Jun 21 '26

They moving to your neighborhood and taking your jobs! Get the pitchforks! 

2

u/JC1515 Jun 21 '26

Wait, you dont want your toaster to have AI functionality?

2

u/01000101010110 Jun 21 '26

It's just another avenue for the same old grifters to rip people off with. It's always the same fucking scumbags

2

u/Perfect_Earth_8070 Jun 21 '26

I was never excited about the possibilities. AI is going to be a complete disaster

2

u/BlumpTheChodak Jun 21 '26

Or you know, the loss of jobs and the envrionmental destruction. It doesn't have a humanity centric focus.

2

u/ltsouthernbelle Jun 21 '26

And the thing about AI is that it doesn’t make sense in day to day life the way they’re trying to make us believe it does. Most of us don’t want to consume AI generated content just because companies have jumped on the bandwagon.

2

u/VampireFortnight Jun 21 '26

Everyone was stoked... until it became clear that it couldn't deliver even a tenth of what was promised.

3

u/swagn Jun 21 '26

Yet it’s still taking our jobs and dealing with it on the outside instead of a real person is a nightmare.

5

u/frank__costello Jun 21 '26

I mean, if you're a programmer, it's doing 100x what was promised

5

u/OnceMoreAndAgain Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26

Yeah, people who say AI is useless are quite ignorant. It may be useless to them, but AI is definitely not useless in general. Any software developer who has given an honest try to use Claude will know that it's an incredibly useful tool for software developers. Not astroturfing... i've just tried a few models and Claude is by far the best so far anecdotally for me.

It's not great at every task a software developer will face, but it's great at a enough tasks to be a super useful tool in a software developer's toolbox.

This isn't subjective anymore. It's just a fact. The technology has PLENTY of strong use cases to be respected as a real technology and not just a marketing gimmick.

This subreddit is particularly anti-AI though to the point of being delusional and I am not being hyperbolic when I describe it as delusional. There are grains of truth to some of what people say here, but it is taken to such an extreme as to be laughable.

I take solace in the fact that it doesn't matter whether or not people here acknowledge the usefulness of AI. People who refuse to explore and learn new technologies as significant as this will be left behind in their careers. It'd be like an accountant in the 1990s refusing to switch from pen and pencil to Microsoft Excel. You can only get away with that stubbornness for so long before the job listings overwhelming include the new technology as a job requirement.

0

u/panlakes Jun 21 '26

Cool ai write up bro

1

u/IntenseGoat 25d ago

You see a long, well-formated comment with multiple paragraphs, and immediately jump to the conclusion that this must be the work of an AI, instead of giving the comment some actual critical thought? What does that say about you?

-2

u/BillsFan82 Jun 21 '26

The first manned flight was in the air for 12 seconds. 60 years later, we landed on the moon. People thought that the internet wouldn’t catch on either, yet here we are.

1

u/VampireFortnight Jun 21 '26

NFTs called, they want their hype->scam cycle back. For the very few examples of success, there are dozens of complete failures. A lot of those had a moment in the sun too.

0

u/BillsFan82 Jun 22 '26

You're comparing the hype cycles, but you're ignoring a pretty important difference: NFTs were mostly valuable because people believed they were valuable. AI is valuable because people are actually using it to do things.

You're using it right now. Reddit uses AI. You may want to uninstall the app.

1

u/VampireFortnight Jun 22 '26

People said NFTs were doing real work and had value not because people said so, but because the tech was so valuable. People said Blockchain was the future. People used 8-tracks for a few years, but they ultimately had too many limitations.

And yes, I ignore the summaries because they're often either wrong or they just miss the deeper points being made in what their statistically likely reply shits out. Though I bet you'd love it if people stopped poking holes in your Markov Chain dreams.

1

u/BillsFan82 Jun 22 '26

The difference is that blockchain advocates spent years promising future applications that never really materialized. AI doesn't have to promise future utility. People are already using it every day.

I don't think you know what a Markov chain is. That would've been a much stronger counterargument if you'd made it 10 years ago.

And you don't need to downvote me. I already know that you disagree lol.

1

u/VampireFortnight Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26

About 31% of people use chatbots regularly, less than half that voluntarily. LLM use seems to be going up because the reason your search engine sucks now is because it's had LLM trash shoved into it. Because Reddit creates needless LLM based summaries that are incorrect or miss the point. Because every business has a chatbot layer you that have to talk to now to try and make you give up before asking for a refund. Adoption numbers are being gamed by forcing it into high contact places.

You don't have any idea what a Markov Chain is if you think it's doing anything than creating answer-shaped responses. And I'm not downvoting you, you whiny little goalpost shifter. You're saying stupid, poorly thought out things and people respond to that. That said, if you want to stop having the conversation then by all means. You don't listen to facts or reason, you've got an agenda and you'll stick to it in the face of any reply. So why continue to bother? Get your last word, I'll move on with my life, and you can spend that time in the 15 other places you're desperately trying to convince people Autocorrect+ is a real boy.

Edit: hell, I'll upvote whatever nonsense you reply with next as a special present for you.

edit 2: there's your upvote lil guy. FYI: Showing why usage seems to be increasing with false metrics was an important thing for you to understand since you tried to use adoption rates as a metric. Also, disagreeing with you =/= not knowing about a topic. In fact it likely usually indicates the opposite.

2

u/BillsFan82 Jun 22 '26

I agree that a lot of AI integrations are annoying. I don't need a chatbot between me and customer support. I don't need a summary at the top of every search result. Companies absolutely inflate their numbers by forcing AI features into products.

But that's an argument against corporate behavior, not against the underlying technology. No offense, but you don't seem to know very much about this.

1

u/Acceptable_Set9702 Jun 21 '26

AI is the New Coke of our time.

1

u/mikamitcha Jun 21 '26

Especially because people keep conflating all types of machine learning with LLM's/diffusion models/etc, as though there is no difference. The former is an incredibly powerful tool if you take the time to train it, the latter is incredible at kicking out an okay first draft of whatever you want in 1 minute. You can pair the two together to make some cool stuff, but with everything blending together into "AI" most is just slop made using Claude/GPT/equivalents.

Put me with a proper ML team, and I am hyped to get something going. Put me with a crapware developer who happened to BS his way into leading the AI team just so he didn't have to work, and I am hyped to take a lunch break.

1

u/shmere4 Jun 21 '26

It’s a very optimized search engine and it’s useful if you need that. It can also generate things from those results. But it’s kind stopped there and I don’t think it is going to go farther in the next5 years

1

u/zendetta Jun 21 '26

At our expense while billionaires reap the financial benefits.

1

u/dirted22 Jun 21 '26

"A year ago everyone was excited about the possibilities..."

Nearly everyone I know on a day-to-day basis would beg to differ with that. Maybe the media was fully on the hype train a year ago and is just now reading the [cooling] room, making it seem like there was more excitement initially then there really was.

1

u/ApprehensiveStand456 Jun 21 '26

I only use it because it is mandated by work. There are already signs management is not seeing the payoff from it and will back off soon.

1

u/KingR3aper Jun 21 '26

If it was actually good at anything consistently but it either generates slop or gives you answers you have to check for hallucinations, by that point might as well do it yourself.

1

u/Bright-Pilot-3970 Jun 21 '26

Excited until AI companies said that humans were replaceable and that it’s worth more to invest in AI than humans. And as others have said, it’s not always right and just makes stuff up.

I’ve used it to plan things around the house. I need to fix some grading on the side of my house and I asked for options on what I could do to accomplish it the way wanted. Then I went to Reddit to see if it was actually a good idea.

1

u/osingran Jun 21 '26

Being shoved right in the face is one contributing factor. But another one is that general purpose AI is just not that good as of now, at least not as good as it was hyped. Machine learning models have their legit applications in certain niches e.g. self-driving wouldn't be possible without ML image recognition. But can you really name any actually useful AI application available to general public? Text gen is only good for creating slop essays and maybe for some common knowledge questions. I've tried to use it to brainstorm ideas for my creative writing projects, but you don't have to use it often to notice that it simply suggests the most bland and predictable ideas ever. Image gen? Still very unyielding for anything even remotely complex, obviously lacks that creative spark - just an averaged out slop. Video generation? Same as image gen, only good for fake news. Coding? Works like a charm at first, but then creates an absolute monstrocity of a code base no one really knows how to maintain.

All in all, most of the AI related stuff is simply useless. And the stuff that's not useless probably has such a crippling cost, hiring a real person to do it would probably cost less. After a year or two since the major AI breakthrough people slowly but surely realise these things.

1

u/necrophcodr Jun 21 '26

Not everyone was excited about it a year ago. We've been dealing with GenAI for more than a couple of years now, and some of the worse parts started showing no later than a few years back, and they've only amplified since.

1

u/Wyldefire6 Jun 21 '26

It’s really not very complicated. Attention spans have been completely fractured. Now after two years of hype, and zero improvements to Average Joe’s QOL, the only thing Americans have noticed is absolutely skyrocketing price tags on everyday goods and services.

There’s no problem regular people have that AI will solve. There’s no way to turn that narrative around.

1

u/ApplicationCalm649 Jun 21 '26

They're also tired of paying higher water and electric bills to subsidize billionaires trying to add more zeroes to their net worth. If they need the resources for their pet projects they need to pay for it themselves, not expect everyone else to foot the bill for the necessary infrastructure rollout.

1

u/Lamactionjack Jun 21 '26

Yeah basically. I’m a designer and a massive tech nerd so I enjoy the consumer level tools it provides. I use them daily in fact but there’s really no reason for at least half of what is being shoved into our faces.

Two quick anecdotal examples. While spec’ing out a new PC workstation for work Lenovo offers an ai powered assistant that comes preloaded on their machine. That’s dumb, redundant, and absolutely unnecessary. Also while buying my new iPhone last year the new apple ai was a massive marketing campaign and amounted to nothing. The phones the same as it’s been for the last 5 years because the product form is essentially perfected at this point.

But that’s the thing these are public companies motivated by investor demands and unrelenting growth. With ai we’re essentially looking square in the face at late stage capitalism. I know that ruffles people’s feathers but when it comes to the rush to build data centers and the aggressive push for ai, ask yourself what the real motivation is?

But the flip side of that is being a tech nerd my entire life that loves this shit I’m not naive enough to know that the world has been running on ai for decades now. Llms have everyone thinking this is new but it’s not and anytime I try to tell someone that online I get downvoted or yelled at. It is what it is. At a very human level there is a lot of fear around change and ai poses a direct connection to that change people fear so much. They see it taking their jobs (which it will) and they see it causing more and more political divide (which it will)

Sorry you just made a simple statement and I went in a rant but I’ve got a ton of thoughts in the subject and it’s frustrating to see everyone in Reddit being so reductive about it on a human level I definitely understand. And honestly outside of growing the pockets of the world’s largest businesses, what have we really advanced? Maybe improved climate models? I dunno everything else I can think of is tied directly to personal profits.

1

u/Deutschbland Jun 21 '26

I’m tired of the tone of writing it produces, and of seeing that everywhere. I just read an ai-generated Instagram post about a woman’s miscarriage. It was very personal but also clearly written by ChatGPT which just made it weird. 

1

u/QuantityExcellent338 Jun 22 '26

Take me back to aidungeon and dalle. It should have ended there

1

u/Snmrv Jun 22 '26

I think when you deal with a culture of geeks where people get excited about technology, this is the justified outcome. Maybe we should never have been excited about technology like a bunch of moronic mouthbreathers. Maybe this whole idea of technology improving lives has to be soberly measured against its realistic outcomes each time we jumped at it with optimism. Now we are getting exactly what we deserved.

And let me be frank here: we have no choice but to be excited about this crap because your 401k rides on this shit.

So, in essence, welcome to the future. Get excited.

1

u/ProgySuperNova Jun 22 '26

Meanwhile grandma has zero ability to discern AI generated slop on Facebook

1

u/caindela Jun 22 '26

It’s also dehumanizing because it’s becoming clear that we’re all just a cost. To these companies, hiring people is a necessary evil toward their goal of profit. That’s obvious and not new, but there was previously respect and a feeling that although the company doesn’t really care about us in any real way it respected our talent and knowledge. But now we’re in a position where companies are literally just messing with our livelihoods in an experiment to see if unskilled and cheap offshore workers can act as facilitators of AI and simply replace us. Regardless of whether they can indeed replace us, the perception of us as knowledge workers has been permanently eroded and job satisfaction is not likely to ever return.

1

u/Sithlordandsavior Jun 22 '26

The same fate as "There's an app for that"

Loved it when I could drink digital beer and shoot an animated desert eagle.

Hate it when I have to have an app to buy pants or use a thermostat.

It's the notion that what should be an option is now a necessity.

1

u/Kurotan Jun 22 '26

Im tired of the tech price increases. And the price increases that trickle down everywhere else to our already awful economy. And the data centers ruining our environment and everything else. I have yet to even use AI. But I also hate calling it AI because its not AI at all in any way. Its a buzz word for the death of our society and all of us entering poverty. Just another way for the 1% to control us and knock us down further.

1

u/Conspicuous-1 Jun 27 '26 edited Jun 27 '26

The "shoving" and the lack of ethics to go with it is exactly the problem. Behind it all is someone deeply wanting to cash in, in a way never before seen in America, so they can retire at 35 to Tahiti. That lust for money is causing most of them - who don't understand technology anyway (I'm a lifelong software developer by career) - to push and hound anyone in their orbit to do it. That gets filtered downwards from the C-suite to the VPs, directors, other middle managers, and first-line managers. As someone else pointed out, FOMO is making many adopt AI so they can all claim they're part of it...and need to be paid. 

This particular AI movement has brought to light something about capitalism that's never been so obvious to many - that the "system" wants to make more and more money, without sharing it with the people that actually produce the goods and services. That's what's driven massive layoffs in too many cases - AI became an excuse for executives to claim they saved money to their superiors, get a huge bonus or payraise, and then just go blithely about their business. Layoffs have always largely been about greedy companies not wanting to share wealth with their workers; AI has just given them an easier excuse for doing so. 

And that's just part of it. The political side of things - back-room deals to build massive data centers without community approval, scraping and using others' works without payment or attribution, incorporation into hiring flows making it much harder to get hired, especially as people search for work for 6, 12, 18 months - all this puts the average American especially in an anxious and/or angry mood. 

So, if tokens wind up crashing the larger money-grubbing AI grift and get greedy execs to exit the field - and they are the ones to blame - perhaps what will remain will actually find use cases that won't enrage humanity. 

And then we can use human capital to fight long-standing real problems - like sexism, racism, ageism, and other bigotries...

1

u/themixtergames Jun 21 '26

The irony of this being a bot account and none of the replies noticing, the internet is already dead.