People really hate AI, so why can’t they get enough?

AI has become one of those technologies people complain about while still using it all the time. That contradiction is now visible in the polls, the product stats, and the sheer amount of anxiety floating around the business.

The distrust is broad. Pew says more adults in the US now expect AI to hurt them personally and society at large than to help. Stanford found that more than half of people worldwide say AI products make them nervous. In a Gallup poll in May, 71% of US adults said they would oppose a new AI data center in their area, a stronger reaction than the one to a nuclear power plant. And in an NBC poll in March, AI was less popular than ICE.

But usage keeps climbing anyway. ChatGPT reached a billion monthly users in May, according to Sensor Tower. Google DeepMind’s Gemini is close behind at 950 million users in July. Pew says half of US adults now use a chatbot, more than double the share in 2023, and one in four say they use one every day. Across the 38 OECD countries, more than a third of adults say they used generative AI tools in the last three months.

So the easy explanation — that there are loving users and hating users in two separate camps — doesn’t really hold up. The article points to something messier: people may not hate AI so much as they hate the aggressive way it is being pushed at them, with companies talking as if a giant social and economic shift is inevitable and everybody else just has to sit there and take it.

That has happened before. Social media and search both drew huge audiences even as the backlash grew. But AI is not locked in the same way yet. States are moving: all 50 have passed or proposed AI laws, and there are now more than 2,100 bills on the books or in the pipeline, a tenfold jump in three years. And there are open-source alternatives on the market, which means users still have some leverage — at least for now.