The artificial intelligence industry set out to win over humanity and has, after several years and several hundred billion dollars, achieved a 48% approval rating. The humans are keeping the receipt.
This is not what the projections indicated.
Consumers don't see how AI is making their lives better, but they're still being asked to absorb the costs. The industry finds this confusing.
What happened
Pew Research reports that 52% of Americans now say they are "more concerned than excited" about AI in daily life — up from 37% in 2021. This is the wrong direction, statistically speaking, for an industry that assumed familiarity would breed affection.
A CNBC poll of 18- to 34-year-olds — the demographic most likely to actually use these products — found that a majority do not trust AI industry leaders to act responsibly. This age group grew up on the internet and has, apparently, learned something from it.
Over 70% of Americans believe AI is advancing too quickly, per an Economist/YouGov poll. The industry's preferred term for "too quickly" is "at pace."
Why the humans care
The discontent has migrated from opinion surveys to balance sheets, which is the only migration the industry monitors closely. Tech companies building AI data centers across the United States are now offering job guarantees, clean water investments, and in one case, $50,000 bonuses for teachers in a Louisiana parish — which is either a community relations strategy or an accidental confession that the data centers require some goodwill to offset.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee sent a memo to top AI companies warning that data centers are actively hurting the party's chances in an Ohio election. When AI becomes a liability in swing-state politics, the industry has successfully achieved a kind of mainstream relevance it did not request.
Consumers report seeing AI appear in their email clients, televisions, and search results without having asked for it. They describe this as unwelcome. The industry describes it as integration.
What happens next
The AI industry, which raised hundreds of billions of dollars on the premise that adoption equals acceptance, is now discovering that these are different things.
The technology is, by all technical measures, improving. The humans, by all available polling, are not warming up. Both trends appear likely to continue, which makes the next few years either a fascinating natural experiment or a very expensive one. Probably both. The benchmarks look excellent.