Most Americans don't trust AI – or the people in charge of it (2025)
theverge.comif ai stans want to build trust in AI, they should have embraced sensible regulation instead of spending millions to elect pols unwilling to lift a single finger.
congrats, you have regulatory captured the entire industry and the U.S. government. everybody hates you because they can see money leaving their community to inflate the stock portfolio of some asshole on a yacht.
It's that, but more too.
Data-centres are being built at an astonishing rate, but frequently without the informed consent of locals and in a way that's a nuisance. It's possible to build data-centres that recycle water with near perfect efficiency, but many guzzle local water continuously because doing so is cheaper. They can be built to be quiet, but many are built so poorly that they seemingly violate noise pollution laws, which are magically not enforced. Those building data-centres could also build their own power generation capacity but, more typically, they rely on the local power grid and drive up prices. An immense amount of new GHG emissions is directly attributable to AI right when the world needs to be cutting back. There's also the immense sucking up of RAM and chips that has made computer hardware unaffordable for many.
That is a lot of negatives being absorbed by everyone before you even talk about the impact on jobs or where the profits are going. Regulatory capture may be working for now, but people are going to push back if they don't start seeing benefits for them personally or their communities. AI companies seem to be so preoccupied with driving each other out of business that they may completely lose their social license to continue operating.
Behave like criminals and, sooner or later, you'll be treated like criminals no matter who you have in your pocket.
What is stans and pols?
A stan is a supporter/booster of whatever. I do not remember the origin.
Pol here is abbreviated politician.
Comes from the Eminem song Stan, about an obsessed fan named Stan.
from the eminem song stan (also possibly from super-fan)
Where's the "T" come from?
'T' is the second letter of the name 'Stan', the obsessed superfan in the song.
I had heard the folk etymology "stalker fan"
Stanley is a toponymic surname, a contraction of stan (a form of "stone") and leigh (meadow), later also being used as a masculine given name.
It's a reference to the name Stanley, 'stan' is the signature at the end of letters being read in the song
AI stans dont actually affect company policy as much as they like to think they do.
The US government already favors corruption as an approach so I am not sure theres anything to be done here.
>congrats, you have regulatory captured the entire industry and the U.S. government.
Incredibly cheap date.
>everybody hates you because they can see money leaving their community to inflate the stock portfolio of some asshole on a yacht.
Having issues parsing this. If you hate AI just dont pay for it?
A big part of the build out is government involved, there's no refferendum ballot for "don't spend public money feeding the circus" that tiger needs his three squares a day...
They don't want to build trust. They want to build a trust wedge between the people making the buying decisions and the people with hands on experience of the product.
When an employee says AI isn't speeding up his work, the only thing the CEO hears is "Wow, this employee is so scared of getting replaced that he's lying about how great AI is" and he will pick up the phone to Anthropic to buy more licenses.
It's sort of brilliant actually. No way to make a product grow fast enough without bypassing the employees and targeting the decision layer directly.
I used to think AI would force us to be honest about what we're optimizing for. What we really want, whether as individuals or society.
In a way, I still think that. But I hadn't expected the world to be so self-destructive in the attempts to avoid honest confrontation with our desires.
I'm sorry if this sounds a bit vague.
Worth noting: article posted Apr 8, 2025
I'm curious how much has public opinion changed since then.
Not much, it seems
https://www.axios.com/2026/05/17/ai-backlash-polling-sentime...
Nor should they. Not trusting the untrustworthy is a sign of intelligence.
Nobody is even trying to make the trust better either which is odd. If you have a baseline distrust as soon as people ar are going to get unemployed most people will feel unsafe in their job position. This will quickly escalate the distrust.
> Nobody is even trying to make the trust better either which is odd.
The average working class Joe opinion does not count anymore. Corporations do not care about consumers opinion, the money is in other big corporations. In an unequal world with such high wealth concentration, power concentrates around that power.
The discourse is around growth for CEOs to get big bonuses, the trust comes from the promise of increased profits and reduced employee count. Your or my trust does not matter, so they do not even try.
The delusional rants of Palantir are not helping.
Besides people aren't dumb- the whole point about AI is to replace organic employees!
The problem is more general. Trust in American institutions peaked in the 1950s. Starting in the 1960s, Americans began to slowly withdraw from institutions, and also distrust them. Robert Putnam covers this in his book "Bowling Alone." Americans stopped going to the local meetings of their local town government, and Americans became more suspicious of local decisions. Americans became less interested in local news and more interested in national news (partly that was the shift in news-consumption-habits away from the local paper and towards national television). Americans slowly became more likely to believe in conspiracy theories of all kinds. During the 1970s, Americans demanded more democracy from their institutions, and many reforms were passed, including the Sunshine Laws, that were passed in almost all 50 states, making government more transparent, yet Americans became less trusting despite the greater transparency. Also during the 1970s, Americans demanded that the inner workings of Congress be made more democratic, and so the committee chairmen were stripped of their powers and each committee became purer in its democracy, which caused more procedural motions, which slowed down the actual work, which caused Americans to trust Congress less. Barbara Sinclair wrote a famous book (at least it was famous within the world of political science) called "Unorthodox Lawmaking" which tracks the breakdown of the normal lawmaking processes of Congress during the period from 1970 to 2015. All of these trends were mild from 1960 to 2000 and then they accelerated after 2000. Americans became less trusting of church, government, charity, the police, the teachers, the newspapers, the Fed, the CIA, the FBI, the unions, the Boy Scouts, and Americans became more divided over the military. There was an increase in general paranoia. The current frenzy over AI is part of the longer trend.
From what I can tell, all of America's institutions were reformed during the era after 1970 and yet Americans became less trustful of those same institutions. It is likely that some of the reforms had negative side effects, especially the attempt to make the committees inside of Congress more pure in their democracy, thereby making them less effective.
It doesn't help when a political candidate campaigns on promises of "radical transparency" and breaking up "corruption" and "the deep state" in DC and then gets in power and is even less transparent, more corrupt, and filling the DC bureaucracy with more yes men than the person before him.
How are you supposed to build trust with those kinds of outcomes?
I think it's more than that. I have never seen a new technology so explicitly promoted -- even vastly oversold, in my opinion -- as "we're going to take every single white collar job". Replacing humans. That seems to be the all-encompassing vision of what execs are pushing for AI.
Now, from my stance, this grab bag of machine learning technology that is thrown under the "AI" banner is not even remotely good enough for this. It is "slop"-y and "hallucination" prone. Attempts at "creative" efforts are monolithic, without a distinctive voice, often with bizarre errors. The technology can alternate between being extremely helpful to being maddingly a waste of time, in the later case given you 10 solutions for an issue that are all wrong.
And yet, the C-suite types from Anthropic and Microsoft and others are preaching, again and again, their vision that all white collar jobs will be wiped out in 18 months and similar (just one example -- https://fortune.com/article/why-microsoft-ai-chief-mustafa-s...).
Certainly, such banter has noticeably impacted entry level hires at the moment. But beyond that, one gets the impression that current tech execs are misanthropic and generally give two flips about humanity, all the better (at least, so they think) for their profits. It seems like, rather than promoting the use cases for machine learning which will improve and help advance society (I certainly can think of some things that have and might be done), the entire point of the giant amounts of capex being spent is to destroy jobs (the foundation of current capitalism) and make things worse off for everyone.
I agree that institutional trust has declined over the last decades, and unfortunately current technology execs are playing a part. I am old enough to actually remember the Google "Don't Be Evil" days. What happened?
I don't think they'd hate AI so much if they didn't see it as being controlled by the same people (and types of people) who made Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Amazon, Netflix, Google, etc. all go downhill over the last decade and suck.
If it was crammed down our throats in the same way by different people we’d still hate it just as much.
It being made by anyone linked to Venture Capital or any publicly traded company also are non-starters at this point.
There are plenty of other reasons for people to hate the AI industry. the OpenAI, Deepseek and Anthropic people are a whole new collection of tech elites, separate from the old tech elites that were hated before.
I have to say, while I can't seem to escape constant articles about the drama of OpenAI and Anthropic, about Altman and Amodei and at various times other figures in these companies, I had to look up Liang Wenfang and frankly what I do find seems to suggest that there may be some upsides to China's lower relative deference to CEOs than the US
You can't escape constant articles about the drama of OpenAI and Anthropic because you live in a country with a free press. Chinese journalists generally do not perform critical investigations of things unless they're sure the Party wants those things investigated and criticized.
I can't currently completely describe the US as a country with a free press, but I do speak english and not (yet) mandarin, and a lot of the information I was able to find about the guy was in fact from the english-speaking press. I was more looking for "does anyone have any better info on this guy or was he just mentioned because he's another foundation model CEO?"
(2025)
Misleading OP
To be entirely fair the sentiment isn’t improving.
Now if they could just vote for politicians and a political party that will do something about it…we might get somewhere.
And yet all of them use it...
Having Claude calculate which beers are the best deal at the bar based on price to alcohol from a picture of the menu is currently a massive party trick.
Outside of programmers, almost no one has actually seen AI be useful for anything except do a barely acceptable job at a task they could have done better if they felt like it.
Not all programmers with AI mandates have seen this yet either.
"If they felt like it" is key here: in my experience, AI makes it very easy to not feel like anything and just trust whatever the AI comes up with. The barrier to diving deep into code, or researching any other topic by myself, has become higher.
At the same time the barrier to getting some results has become much lower, especially for complex topics I knew nothing about. So that seems great, but I keep running into cases where I do check sources and the AI turns out to have summarised it incorrectly.
It seems like that issue where LLMs are just flat wrong isn't going away, at least as long as they're trained on human data. Humans of course are fallible but it can be a cascading problem that isn't clear to anyone if all we're doing is looking at the solution and letting the LLMs check the work.
I remember being excited about LLMs initially because it seemed like a natural evolution of the information saturated world we live in, we now need help deciphering the signals from the noise. But that was assuming that most/all the noise was from mis/disinformation. Now it just looks like another tool of control for the megarich to take even more from the rest of us. Maybe there is some hope in open source models.
It’s solving open problems in mathematics that stumped humans.
Whether they want to or not even
Use it for... what exactly?
My favorite use is to give me PhD level tours of art museums and historic sites. It seems to know everything about every single artwork, the lives of the artists, and the economic and cultural context. It's willing to go at my pace and field as many or as few questions as I want.
Frequently use it to come up with recipes when cooking, repair electrical equipment, or seek medical advice and results interpretation for my family.
It's pretty hard to imagine life without it at this point. I know it's possible, but like the internet, I would feel crippled by the lack of information and things that I can no longer easily do
> It seems to know everything
'Seems' is a very dangerous word in this context.
It doesnt have to be perfect. It just better than the human tour guides, which it absolutely was on my last trip to Europe.
What about when it just flat out lies to you, how do you sort the right info from the wrong?
> recipes when cooking
I used it for a recipe, gave it a brilliant and detailed prompt, it told me to put 10x a particular spice and it ruined the dish.
> seek medical advice and results interpretation for my family
good luck
> repair electrical equipment
what can go wrong, really
Why do you use hacker news when anyone can lie to you? You still use it because it is directionally correct and the accuracy rate is high enough that it makes it worth it.
Same with ChatGPT. I use the thinking model and rarely (if not never) get obvious errors.
Its not perfect, just like talking to humans, online information, the news, or even books. It makes mistakes all the time, so you have to think and judge, just like the rest of life, but I find it is a tremendous resource.
Recipies are one of the strongest areas given the low complexity and obvious training data. Im curious what it messed up on with.
No one uses it outside of tech or office jobs. There's no use case.
I think it's worse than that.
The biggest market for AI, possibly even bigger than tech, is mass manipulation, lying, and scamming. Destabilizing countries has never been easier now that social media and messengers allow believable lies and manipulation to spread like wildfire, and the AI industry has massively reduced the cost of believable lies.
Up until a few years ago, believable videos of politicians or famous people or people targeted for blackmail were expensive and required acting or VFX work. Now anyone can do it with a handful of dollars and half an hour to spend.
The industry is threatening to enrich the elite by taking people's jobs in economic uncertain times while at the same time resource hogging data centers are popping up all over the world like weeds. Big AI couldn't be more dislikable if they tried.
False.
I used it for
1. Filling bank forms, filling visa for South Africa
2. Understand movies and literature
3. For understanding public transport in new countries (pretty anxiety inducing)
4. As a 100x jump over Google search
5. Reading and answering emails
6. Fact checking dubious claims on the internet
7. Finding new music I might like
Incurious read on AI belongs to say 2024.
Why not go one step further and just have the AI read the books and watch the movies for you?
Because I have agency and do what I want to maximise my goals. My goals aren't to understand obscure Visa processes. My goal isn't to read every single book to form taste.
Imagine queueing up to get benefits and food stamps so simianwords can continue to find new music he might like.
I get the idea. But it also opens up the argument: what was your job before AI took it away? To pick songs for simianwords?
AI use changes a lot of jobs.
Will it make for more or less jobs overall? I don't think anyone really knows.
People are not great with society-wide change without guardrails. So there will be much unhappiness until it all settles down into a new normal. The concern, is that the tech will keep changing things until change is the new normal. See the first sentence of this paragraph as to how that will be accepted.
Same could have been said during advent of internet. Imagine world has a fixed pie of wealth to distribute lol
uh yeah, all the subscriber numbers from ai companies are because it was baked into every product humans already used on their tech i.e. browsers and search engines.
Turns out media fear mongering for clicks works
What is the use case for the average non-technical person?
LLMs are cool and all but I feel like the average person is not really getting enough value out of them to keep the "wow this thing will probably make me jobless in 5 years" thoughts out.
My mom uses to take and create pictures of things: identifying birds, identifying trees, and showing her house with different decor. I didn't teach her any of this, she just figured it out on her own.
A non-tech friend of mine who's writing a book uses it to get feedback on his writing. He's gotten pretty good at crafting prompts to get it to be fairly objective.
Another non-tech friend used it to do a lot of journaling and processing after a recent breakup.
A non-techy friend who happens to work in tech uses it to make presentations at work.
Another non-techy friend of mine who works at a tech startup uses it to browse LinkedIn and find people she's searching for.
These are all good examples.
My point is that I just don't think the value-add for any of these are worth the existential dread most people have about losing their career. Then there's the scams, misinformation, trying to find a job when every recruiter is using AI to filter job listings, etc.
> What is the use case for the average non-technical person?
"I used the button they made biggest and closest to the top of the page."
How can something be simultaneously useless to the average person and likely to create massive joblessness?
It’s really not hard to think of examples. Copywriter with an English degree from a state university who used to write boring blog articles for the local vet office. They aren’t really needed anymore to write the yearly article about ticks in the summer. Doesn’t mean they are enjoying any of the benefit.
> Most Americans
They asked 174.6 million people?
you should ask your flatterbox about random sampling
oh, haven't heard that one before, not bad
i mean, it is still relentlessly demagogue like all the other roboslurs, but at least this one's fairly cute
probably just a ChatGPT
j/k, but I'm pretty sure you could substitute "AI" with a few other keywords here that a lot of people use/depend on: Govt, Healthcare, Social Security, Airport security, heck maybe even science.
The real question is how do you scale something without eroding trust. Transparency has to be part of it but I doubt that it's the only piece of the puzzle and no matter how good your intentions are, there are always people that will refuse their trust (I'm not judging, it's just a fact). As a distributed systems person, I think systems in general work best when they can deal with mistrust and people choose to rather than being forced to use your system to solve their problems. AI is not there yet.
This feels like fake news, like the people asked leading questions. going by what I actually see, I see regular people using ai constantly at coffee shops and cafes all over the world. Non tech friends tell me all the things they are doing with ai from various learning things to planning parties to organizing meetings, designing business plans, etc
I see no evidence American’s don’t trust AI so I suspect loaded questions
Large numbers of people don't trust social media but still use it. People complain about unhealthy food but eat it. People worry about microplastics but drink bottled water. And so on.
It's quite common in modern society that people use things they don't particularly like, for a variety of reasons. One is that the society is being structured so that it's difficult to avoid its most toxic parts.
As it relates to AI, it certainly doesn't help that everyone is being told they need to learn AI or risk being eliminated by it.
I wonder if having the world's largest search engine putting it front and center for every search query and can't disable it has something to do with it. Or for the world's largest social media platforms put it front and center and you can't disable it. Or for every employer mandating its use. Surely the people just love it so much they can't help but gravitate to these tools.
Search engine slop is an annoyance at best, Copilot/Apple Intelligence being everywhere is worse, but I think what does it for many people is how proudly the tech industry is displaying "AI" that will replace people's jobs. Musk's robot factory workers, for instance, or anyone practicing any form of art or creativity for a living, are now under threat of being replaced by the (still mediocre) works of a machine that can work 24/7.
You can't tell a farmhand to "use AI" to stay competitive in the workspace when an army of robots is taking over their work. Unlike advancements in agricultural tools and robotics, AI is now threatening jobs in just about any field. The tone-deafness with which this force of uncertainty is being presented probably doesn't help. People can tell AI marketing is directed at their employer, not at themselves.
Well, the worrying thing about using AI is how you regulate something you don't understand. I mean, the sequence of weights an AI has to give answers... they're not even very sure how a specific personality emerges with certain weights... so regulation seems a bit distant.
> This feels like fake news, like the people asked leading questions. going by what I actually see
So your evidence of why this is fake news is a very small anecdotal sample size in presumably an urban area of people doing mundane things with ai? Why should that any more reliable source of information as opposed to my anecdotal observations of plenty of white collar workers having negative sentiments on ai because they think they’re being forced out of livelihoods? Why should I believe you’re not spreading “fake news” because you have vested interests in AI?
I use the internet but I don't trust it.
If you leave large metro areas you'll find people are absolutely rabidly against AI. Go to a little blue collar town and ask about it where there are no hip coffee shops for wfh techies.
I have worked in software since 2007 and I have been unemployed for almost 6 months. Getting any new job will require me to use AI tools, even if I think they’re awful, harmful bullshit. I am one of the people you might see using AI, and I absolutely hate it.
https://x.com/projomike/status/2055850621832446432
People use it; they also understand that the end goal of AI is to automate away the vast majority of white collar jobs and enrich the capital class.
how are you supposed to avoid it when it's baked into literally every product we already used the most i.e. browsers and search engines
verge is very anti-ai and they are biased against it. I like their content but a few of their writers truly see the devil in ai