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

Some in Silicon Valley may think this stems from a messaging problem: that perhaps execs need to explain AI better to consumers, so people can fully understand its benefits.

The reality, however, could be that consumers understand AI well enough as it is, but don’t think the trade-offs are worth it. When the upside offered isn’t automated jobs with increased pay and reduced workweeks, but instead the threat of job loss, paired with AI features consumers find far less compelling — things like summarized web pages, or chatty TVs — that skepticism hardens.

There are those in the industry waking up to this.

On a recent podcast, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky acknowledged that the AI backlash is real, and that it’s largely tied to the fact that the industry isn’t shipping products that “regular people” like.

“I think part of it’s a narrative issue that we’re not talking about AI correctly,” Chesky said. “But part of it is we need to actually be developing more products that just regular people can use and say, ‘I love AI because AI allows me to have a doctor on demand and I can’t have that. I can’t afford that.’ And so I think we need more regular things.”

Even Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, one of the industry’s most prominent leaders, admitted in a post on X this week that negative public perception of AI is a “big problem” that’s fundamentally a “crisis of trust.” He said people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry, as they “suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over.”

The solution, he said, was to deliver on AI’s promises — for example, curing cancer.

“I think by far the most accurate criticism of AI companies, including Anthropic, is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world. That is totally on us,” he noted.