Silicon Valley executives are struggling to explain why the public hates artificial intelligence. The uncomfortable reality is that many people are not optimistic about the technology being built. Recent attempts by CEOs to diagnose the root of this problem show a fundamental misunderstanding of what drives societal disdain.
Meanwhile, popular culture is finding ways to profit from this anger. Liquid Death and Garage Beer teamed up with former Philadelphia Eagles player Jason Kelce to invite people to urinate in bottles and mail them to data centres. In an interview, Liquid Death’s creative lead told Marketing Dive that the backlash against data centres is “literally the one thing that unites all Americans right now.”
More than half of Americans under 30 say they are more concerned than excited about AI. This figure has grown by 24 per cent in the last five years, according to a Pew Research Center survey published earlier this week. More than 70 per cent of people polled in all age groups believe AI will lead to fewer jobs.
Other polling data shows people have broader anxieties that go beyond employment and the data centre boom. Americans think AI will harm young people’s ability to form meaningful relationships. They believe tech companies should compensate creators whose works were used to train models. There is also fear that AI could damage the critical thinking skills of students.
The tech industry often attributes the backlash to a communication or branding problem. This is not the case. Hearing different messages made little difference in people’s opinions on the technology’s societal impact, according to a recent survey from the Searchlight Institute.
While Silicon Valley grapples with growing negative public sentiment, investors and executives I speak to worry the industry is failing to comprehend how big a problem this could be for product adoption.
Earlier this month, Mark Zuckerberg published a 6,500-word essay outlining an optimistic vision of an AI future. The Meta CEO described a world where everyone has a personalised AI assistant that knows them intimately and can help with their career, hobbies, and raising children. Such a product does not exist yet. Zuckerberg is essentially arguing that giving everyone unfettered access to highly capable AI is the best-case scenario.
I am optimistic that AI will continue to improve and become more helpful. I am sceptical this will be enough to transform how people feel about it. For people to use the theoretical product Zuckerberg envisions, they will need a lot of trust in the companies that build it. Current polling suggests the AI industry has yet to earn that trust.
Zuckerberg also made a not-so-subtle jab at Dario Amodei, saying he was surprised that “discourse from many developing AI is so filled with doom.” On social media and during an appearance on the All-In podcast, tech investor Gavin Baker reiterated Zuckerberg’s points and went further, writing that “Dario’s messaging has been massively helpful to efforts to ban data centers here in America.” White House AI adviser and All-In co-host David Sacks chimed in as well, writing that Anthropic‘s “narratives have done more than anything to shape public fear.”
These comments prompted a rare public response from Amodei, who published a lengthy social media post rejecting the idea that his messaging caused the backlash.
“I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust,” Amodei wrote. “I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over. The causes of this go back decades and AI is just the latest iteration of it.”
Amodei’s initial assertions ring closer to the truth, but he loses me later on. He wrote that “the most accurate criticism of AI companies including Anthropic is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world.” One example he cites is the promise that AI will find a cure for cancer, a goal he has previously said people should reasonably expect the technology to achieve.
Amodei and Silicon Valley broadly may be missing the point. The AI backlash was not caused by scary warnings from tech CEOs or the fact that OpenAI and Anthropic have not yet cured cancer. It is about the ways AI is already starting to change society, which many Americans fear is for the worse.
Tech companies have spent enormous effort making physical data centres more digestible to the public, with promises around responsible water usage, clean energy commitments, and investments in local communities. Unfortunately for them, there is a lot of evidence suggesting the data centre buildout has simply become the physical manifestation of people’s hatred of AI and the ways tech companies engage with communities overall.
I often talk to rank-and-file employees at AI companies who understand these issues and hear about the backlash from their own families and friends across the country. But the leaders at the centre of the AI boom still appear unprepared to address all the ways AI is changing the world. Silicon Valley will need to find a way to confront these issues more directly in the future if it wants people to fully embrace the products it is building.
What it means
Executives are focusing on fixing their messaging or building better data centres. This approach ignores the core issue: public trust in the institutions running these technologies is already broken. Until companies address how AI is currently altering daily life and community relations, technical improvements alone will not resolve the resistance.
