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Silicon Valley is trying to make sense of the growing backlash against artificial intelligence, but so far, it’s not going that well. The inconvenient truth is that a significant portion of the world is not optimistic about the technology they’re building. But recent attempts to diagnose the root of the problem by CEOs like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei indicate they don’t understand what’s actually driving society’s disdain for AI.
The rest of popular culture, meanwhile, is finding ways to capitalize on AI hate. Just look at this new commercial for Liquid Death and Garage Beer. The two beverage brands teamed up with former Philadelphia Eagles football player and Taylor Swift brother-in-law Jason Kelce, who invited people to pee in bottles and send them to AI data centers. In an interview with Marketing Dive, Liquid Death’s creative lead said the data center backlash was “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, a figure that’s grown 24 percent in the last five years, according to a Pew Research Center survey published earlier this week. More than 70 percent of people polled in all age groups say they believe AI will lead to fewer jobs.
But other recent polling data shows that people have broader anxieties about the technology that go far beyond jobs and the data center boom. Americans also think AI will harm young people’s ability to form meaningful relationships, that tech companies should be required to compensate creators whose works were used to train models, and that AI could harm the critical thinking skills of students.
The tech industry often chalks up the AI backlash to a communication and branding problem, but it’s much deeper than that. Hearing different messages around AI 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 is starting to grapple with growing negative public sentiment about AI, investors and executives I talk to have grown increasingly worried that the industry is failing to fully comprehend how big of a problem this could be for adoption of AI products.
Earlier this month, Zuckerberg published a 6,500-word essay painting his optimistic vision of an AI future. The Meta CEO described a world in which everyone has a personalized AI assistant that knows you intimately (presumably from all the personal information Meta’s apps have collected) and can help with your career, hobbies, and perhaps even raising your children. Of course, such a product doesn’t exist yet, but Zuckerberg is basically arguing that giving everyone unfettered access to highly capable AI is the best-case scenario for this technology.
I’m optimistic that AI will continue getting better and more helpful, but I’m skeptical that this will be enough to transform the way people feel about it. For people to even use the theoretical product Zuckerberg envisions, they will need to have a lot of trust in the companies that build it. Current polling suggests that the AI industry has yet to earn that trust.
The Meta CEO also made a not-so-subtle jab at 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 even 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 in which he rejected the idea that his messaging was the culprit of the AI 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 went on to write 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’s previously said that people should reasonably expect the technology to achieve.
Amodei, and Silicon Valley broadly, may be missing the forest for the trees here. The AI backlash was not caused by scary warnings about the future from tech CEOs, or the fact that OpenAI and Anthropic have not yet cured cancer. It’s 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 centers more digestible to the public, with promises around responsible water usage, clean energy commitments, and investments in local communities. But unfortunately for them, there’s a lot of evidence suggesting that the data center 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 center of the AI boom still appear to be unprepared to address all the ways in which 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’s building.
This is an edition of Maxwell Zeff’s Model Behavior newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.
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