The Rise of the Anti-AI Movement

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Today on the AI Daily Brief, we are talking about the rise of the anti-AI movement. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
All right, friends, quick notes before we dive in. If you live anywhere near New York right now, you know we are just coming off of getting truly walloped by what is predicted to be one of the biggest blizzards in the last five years. Unfortunately for me, it turns out that the blizzard's path and timing was nearly identical to our family's flight back from South America, meaning of course that it got pushed and I am having to record this show in advance. Now this kind of works out because this is a topic I've wanted to do for a little while now and was planning to do sometime this week, but this is a prerecord. I'm actually recording this on Sunday, February 22nd, unless something dramatic happens, I should be back tomorrow with our normal format. So what we are talking about today is the anti-AI movement. And to be honest, calling it a movement might be a little overstated at the moment. It is certainly not one big organized thing. The reasons for it are not monolithic and it would be reasonable for one to ask to what extent this is just driven by media narrative. It is certainly the case that for the last few years, since the launch of ChatGPT, we've had a pretty never ending cycle of AI hype and enthusiasm as the main media story around it, followed by some type of skeptical narrative when that excited narrative fails to be exciting anymore. And the media is all over this one right now. Just this weekend from the New York Times, we got a piece called People Love the.com Boom, the AI Boom, Not So Much. In it, author David Straitfield asks, Tech leaders are beginning to worry about the public's underwhelming enthusiasm for their plans to remake the world with artificial intelligence. Will that burst the bubble? And then of course even more commented on, the Time Magazine cover from last week called The People vs. AI. The cover features nine headshots of people who, for various reasons, find themselves opposed to AI at least as it's currently constituted, forming the basis for a large cover story about this emergent political and societal force. For some, they believe that this is all somewhat deserving of scorn. Lumps on X shared a remixed version of the Time Magazine cover, this one featuring nine cave people, with the headline being The People vs. the Wheel. Grunts from the silent majority dragging rocks and rolling is a drag. I've also seen plenty of versions of this with the People vs. the Internet or the People vs. any other technology. Now, of course, what's being implied here is that with any new technology, there's always some amount of resistance that eventually looks silly and short-sighted in retrospect. And for those who are most involved in this technology, I do understand the frustration of feeling assailed for building or working on a thing that you think is going to be really positive, but where it feels like so many people are genuinely mad at you just for doing what you're doing. And yet, I think it would be a mistake to view the rise of anti-AI sentiment as simply a media narrative. There is a huge and growing canon of studies that show particularly Americans have extreme skepticism around AI. A recent YouGov study found that 58% of Americans said that they don't have trust in AI versus 35% who do. 45% of Americans said that they think that AI's effect on the economy will be mostly negative versus just 16% who think that it will be more positive than negative. And nearly two-thirds of Americans in that YouGov poll, 63% think AI will lead to a decrease in the number of jobs available in the US versus just 7% who think that it will increase the number of jobs. In a Pew Research poll from last year, the US ranked dead last in terms of the ratio of citizens who were more concerned versus more excited about AI. Only 10% of those polled said that they were more excited than concerned versus 50% who said they were more concerned than excited. So the point here is that whatever reasons you want to ascribe to it, and even if you think that it is overblown in the media narrative, there is definitely a base level of skepticism and concern among Americans when it comes to artificial intelligence. And what's more, it seems to be growing. A number of videos out of New Brunswick, New Jersey went viral on X after hundreds of citizens showed up to a planning meeting about a data center and got the project canceled. That video shared just a couple of days ago got 5 million views. Organizer Ben Zobiak who posted the video wrote, A data center in New Brunswick was canceled tonight when hundreds of residents showed up. When we fight big tech and private equity, we win. AI curator Andrew Curran writes, After three years, it seems to me that public anti-AI sentiment in the West is now at its highest point. Political commentator and statistician Nate Silver has been talking about this a lot. He recently tweeted, If AI produces unprecedented levels of technological disruption on time scales that are an order of magnitude or two faster than anything in human history, it's going to be an unprecedented political fight. And for what it's worth, the timelines potentially line up with the 2028 US election. He also talks about how this white-collar first disruption doesn't have political precedent. He writes, Usually these transitions would take decades and not affect white-collar workers first, to have more political power. Displacement of narrow classes of blue-collar workers, e.g. coal miners, even if most of society would benefit, usually causes huge political battles. Here the displacement would be much broader, the benefits are less clear, and the people displaced are more influential. In another tweet more specifically focused on the data center concern, Nate writes, Opposition to building data centers might be irrational at the micro scale, they're just going to be built somewhere else. But at the mezzo scale, people are profoundly doubtful about whether AI will broadly benefit society, and that's not so irrational at all. People don't like being forced into prisoners' dilemmas they didn't ask for, and it is macro-level rational for them to feel resistance and indeed resentment towards that. Joe Weizenthal from Bloomberg's Odd Lots perhaps somewhat provocatively, as is his style on Twitter, writes, This is a good take. I haven't heard anyone in the AI world credibly articulate why the average person should assume it will make their life better. Typically they say the opposite. Ethan Malik writes, I would add that when imagining backlash, people think of dunes butlerian jihad or luddites. But what those fights actually looked like during the previous industrial revolutions were about regulation, redistribution, nationalization, unions and safety nets. Could expect similar.