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.

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...

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.

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.

Most of the media is owned by tech billionaires, the Murdochs and other Trump allies, so that's an odd conspiracy theory.

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