Particularly when there is no plan for all the displaced folks who no longer have jobs. Essentially the brilliant plan seems to be to fire humans working their jobs and getting paid, replace them with "AI", give savings to the CEO or billionaire class, let the jobless people starve or something. Like, you don't need an AI Assistant to tell you that this plan will create backlash.
Working to eat and improve one's own livelihood is great. The problem with our model is that most of the output of my work doesn't go to those things - it goes to some rich dude who's gonna keep shoving ads to my face and burning the planet I live in.
Anecdotally, I don't know anyone who picks up random tools, unrelated to AI, because AI is advertised.
Usually when I see people see a pop-off for Try our AI assistant I hear "Fuck off" or "leave me alone" while they close it. It's like everything has a modern Clippy.
Personally I do see it as a VC signal, as if they gave up on making a good tool and started working on slopifying it.
60% is lower than I imagined, tbh. Most people aren't doing agentic workflows and AI is likely not a selling point.
The AI promoters are themselves saying these things because it is the positive case for their business, that other businesses can pay them for AI services that are cheaper and better than keeping existing jobs.
> Speaking at the Capital Framework for Large Banks conference at the Federal Reserve board of governors, Altman told the crowd that certain job categories would be completely eliminated by AI advancement.
> “Some areas, again, I think just like totally, totally gone,” he said, singling out customer support roles. “That’s a category where I just say, you know what, when you call customer support, you’re on target and AI, and that’s fine.”
And I'm sure the 50 year-old guy with the nice job at the stables just loved hearing Henry Ford talk about how nobody was going to own horses anymore.
This is an article about consumer sentiment. Consumers care much more about their own financial security than about Sam Altman's vision of a glorious future.
Got any sources for those claims that show how broadly adopted ai is in those countries? I lookes at japan and china and could find a few articles, the anime one cites a single anime made with ai and nothing about its reception and similar results for china
You think this is the media's fault? The media didn't force Altman and Amodei to tell everyone they were about to lose their jobs. The media didn't force Microsoft and Google to push half-cocked AI features into all of their products. The media didn't concoct secretive deals with municipalities so that residents didn't know data centers were being built in their neighborhoods until it was too late.
The AI industry has caused every single issue that it faces. It's absurd that you can't see this. "The media" barely even means anything anymore as the current landscape is so fractured. Who are you even talking about? Ed Zitron?
A lot of those developing nations use it specifically to produce useless slop. Blog spam from India is also very common.
I do use AI myself and don't believe its worthless, but I believe its only useful when you ask it fairly specific questions, with data it can consume publicly like "whats the rules for XYZ in this standard and if i do this problem like this in this way would that comply with those rules?" Type of thing.
I've also found it useful for programming (but often does miss things or do things a long-handed way) you have to be very careful about the results and not simply accept it because it appears to work, so it still requires a human to have a brain.
I'm not at all surprised that consumers dislike AI in this way because of the way its used, eg to replace help desk support, and create further distance between consumers and the companies they do business with. That's generally 100% how those companies use it because that is how AI companies have marketed it to executives.
Only now are we seeing posts from those people saying "waahh tokens cost too much how long till we can build our own AI". Which is another point in itself business workflows should be resilient and not heavily dependent on the cost of openai or anthropic tokens to be competitive. If these two companies can simply turn up the money knob and make your business have a huge risk then that's bad.
Also 100% we need to have sovereignty. We cannot depend on a single country to provide AI infrastructure. They can just shut it off whenever they feel like it. Maybe this week it's Fable/Mythos, and next week it's an entire country because Donald is unhappy and wouldn't "make a deal" on some thing he wants.
The problem is that many people recognize it for what it is (not real AI), and they are against society paying large cost for its advancement AS IF it is true AI or a path to it.
> Data centers are evil. Water is being destroyed. Eight whole rivers are drained to make a cat jpeg.
> Rich people are stealing all the jobs.
That would be a rare occurrence of the media doing its job because literally all of those things are true.
One difference between China and the US is that China won't allow data centers to jack up electricity prices, make things more expensive, be an environmental nightmare or create an unemployment crisis. None of those guardrails exist the US and honestly most Western "democracies".
Maybe there wouldn't be this reaction if we didn't have an affordability crisis and our government wasn't just 5 companies in a trench coat doing its best to do the largest wealth transfer to the wealthy in history then maybe, just maybe, we'd have a different attitude to AI.
I read a thing awhile ago that companies are increasingly resentful of having to go through you to get your money and I think about that often because it feels like the most accurate description of living in 2026.
The only one that's not entirely true is the water usage concern. The vast amount of water usage is non-consumptive, and you can even use reclaimed wastewater. To be clear, I'm on your side-- I just want to make sure that we don't give our opponents any ammunition by spouting misinformation. I'm happy to be proven wrong on this.
https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake
> The vast amount of water usage is non-consumptive
This is not true in any of the datacenters in my state. Their water usage is not only extreme enough to be causing genuine hardship in the communities they're near, but they have recently begun pressuring cities to allow them to drain even more water out of the local supplies.
The explicit and overt messaging from AI companies in the West is directly and loudly claiming their goal is to put people out of work.
In a society where we've normalized "wage slave or death by starvation", yeah, you're gonna get backlash.
I think you hit the nail on the head. In a winner take most society why would you expect the masses to embrace a technology that makes them losers?
Particularly when there is no plan for all the displaced folks who no longer have jobs. Essentially the brilliant plan seems to be to fire humans working their jobs and getting paid, replace them with "AI", give savings to the CEO or billionaire class, let the jobless people starve or something. Like, you don't need an AI Assistant to tell you that this plan will create backlash.
> In a society where we've normalized "wage slave or death by starvation"
Not just a society - the whole world is like that by default.
Your post implies that these things don't apply outside of the west but I don't see how they don't equally apply everywhere.
Also, is it abnormal that if you don't do work you can't eat? That seems like a pretty fundamental truth of life on earth.
Working to eat and improve one's own livelihood is great. The problem with our model is that most of the output of my work doesn't go to those things - it goes to some rich dude who's gonna keep shoving ads to my face and burning the planet I live in.
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Anecdotally, I don't know anyone who picks up random tools, unrelated to AI, because AI is advertised.
Usually when I see people see a pop-off for Try our AI assistant I hear "Fuck off" or "leave me alone" while they close it. It's like everything has a modern Clippy.
Personally I do see it as a VC signal, as if they gave up on making a good tool and started working on slopifying it.
60% is lower than I imagined, tbh. Most people aren't doing agentic workflows and AI is likely not a selling point.
> Rich people are stealing all the jobs.
The AI promoters are themselves saying these things because it is the positive case for their business, that other businesses can pay them for AI services that are cheaper and better than keeping existing jobs.
> Speaking at the Capital Framework for Large Banks conference at the Federal Reserve board of governors, Altman told the crowd that certain job categories would be completely eliminated by AI advancement.
> “Some areas, again, I think just like totally, totally gone,” he said, singling out customer support roles. “That’s a category where I just say, you know what, when you call customer support, you’re on target and AI, and that’s fine.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/22/openai-sa...
You should've seen what the internal combustion engine did to the horse and cart industry.
Sure, so the economic anxiety from people with careers in the horse and cart industry was fully justified.
And I'm sure the 50 year-old guy with the nice job at the stables just loved hearing Henry Ford talk about how nobody was going to own horses anymore.
This is an article about consumer sentiment. Consumers care much more about their own financial security than about Sam Altman's vision of a glorious future.
Got any sources for those claims that show how broadly adopted ai is in those countries? I lookes at japan and china and could find a few articles, the anime one cites a single anime made with ai and nothing about its reception and similar results for china
I know there's a lot of blog articles with blogspam ai slop with indian sounding names, so that's anecdotal but i have noticed that in tech.
You think this is the media's fault? The media didn't force Altman and Amodei to tell everyone they were about to lose their jobs. The media didn't force Microsoft and Google to push half-cocked AI features into all of their products. The media didn't concoct secretive deals with municipalities so that residents didn't know data centers were being built in their neighborhoods until it was too late.
The AI industry has caused every single issue that it faces. It's absurd that you can't see this. "The media" barely even means anything anymore as the current landscape is so fractured. Who are you even talking about? Ed Zitron?
A lot of those developing nations use it specifically to produce useless slop. Blog spam from India is also very common.
I do use AI myself and don't believe its worthless, but I believe its only useful when you ask it fairly specific questions, with data it can consume publicly like "whats the rules for XYZ in this standard and if i do this problem like this in this way would that comply with those rules?" Type of thing.
I've also found it useful for programming (but often does miss things or do things a long-handed way) you have to be very careful about the results and not simply accept it because it appears to work, so it still requires a human to have a brain.
I'm not at all surprised that consumers dislike AI in this way because of the way its used, eg to replace help desk support, and create further distance between consumers and the companies they do business with. That's generally 100% how those companies use it because that is how AI companies have marketed it to executives.
Only now are we seeing posts from those people saying "waahh tokens cost too much how long till we can build our own AI". Which is another point in itself business workflows should be resilient and not heavily dependent on the cost of openai or anthropic tokens to be competitive. If these two companies can simply turn up the money knob and make your business have a huge risk then that's bad.
Also 100% we need to have sovereignty. We cannot depend on a single country to provide AI infrastructure. They can just shut it off whenever they feel like it. Maybe this week it's Fable/Mythos, and next week it's an entire country because Donald is unhappy and wouldn't "make a deal" on some thing he wants.
The problem is that many people recognize it for what it is (not real AI), and they are against society paying large cost for its advancement AS IF it is true AI or a path to it.
And rightly so
> The media is actively instilling hate for AI.
> Data centers are evil. Water is being destroyed. Eight whole rivers are drained to make a cat jpeg.
> Rich people are stealing all the jobs.
That would be a rare occurrence of the media doing its job because literally all of those things are true.
One difference between China and the US is that China won't allow data centers to jack up electricity prices, make things more expensive, be an environmental nightmare or create an unemployment crisis. None of those guardrails exist the US and honestly most Western "democracies".
Maybe there wouldn't be this reaction if we didn't have an affordability crisis and our government wasn't just 5 companies in a trench coat doing its best to do the largest wealth transfer to the wealthy in history then maybe, just maybe, we'd have a different attitude to AI.
I read a thing awhile ago that companies are increasingly resentful of having to go through you to get your money and I think about that often because it feels like the most accurate description of living in 2026.
The only one that's not entirely true is the water usage concern. The vast amount of water usage is non-consumptive, and you can even use reclaimed wastewater. To be clear, I'm on your side-- I just want to make sure that we don't give our opponents any ammunition by spouting misinformation. I'm happy to be proven wrong on this. https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake
> The vast amount of water usage is non-consumptive
This is not true in any of the datacenters in my state. Their water usage is not only extreme enough to be causing genuine hardship in the communities they're near, but they have recently begun pressuring cities to allow them to drain even more water out of the local supplies.
> I just want to make sure that we don't give our opponents any ammunition by spouting misinformation.
Your enemies aren’t afraid to spout misinformation, and they’re winning.
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Most of the media is owned by tech billionaires, the Murdochs and other Trump allies, so that's an odd conspiracy theory.
It's crazy how they're the ones with all the power and control at this point and they're still playing victim.
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