AI was supposed to win people over by now — it hasn’t

摘要: Despite its technological progress, AI’s reputation out in the real world is getting worse. On Wednesday,

Axios reported

that the National Republica

正文

Despite its technological progress, AI’s reputation out in the real world is getting worse. On Wednesday,

Axios reported

that the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent a memo to top AI companies warning that U.S. data centers are hurting the party’s chances in a key Ohio election. At the same time,

Pew Research released a study

that found that Americans’ unease about AI is growing — 52% said they’re “more concerned than excited” about the increased use of AI in daily life, up from 37% in 2021.

Image Credits:

Pew Research

A recent

CNBC poll

of 18- to 34-year-olds found that, when given the names of nine top leaders in the AI industry, a majority of the respondents said they don’t trust those people to “act responsibly” when it comes to AI. A May

Economist/YouGov

that over 70% of

Americans think AI is advancing too quickly. The list goes on.

Image Credits:

All that discontent is starting to show up on balance sheets.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week

that tech companies are facing a public relations crisis over their plans to build AI data centers across the U.S., leading them to agree to sweeten the deals — offering job guarantees, clean water investments, and other local perks. (In one case, that even included

$50,000 bonuses for teachers

in a Louisiana parish.)

The underlying sentiment spanning these stories is that consumers don’t see how AI is making their lives better, but they’re still being asked to absorb the costs. For an industry that has raised hundreds of billions of dollars on the promise of AI’s inevitability, that souring public sentiment is becoming a business problem, not just a PR debacle, and the industry’s own leaders are starting to notice.

Today, many consumers think of AI in narrower terms, like AI chatbots or AI search experiences (like

the now AI-transformed Google

). They see AI features infiltrating their everyday products, from

, whether they wanted them or not. T

来源: TechCrunch AI