In case there was any doubt over the powerful tide of anti-AI sentiment, a new poll shows that most Americans are incredibly pessimistic about the technology.
The poll, conducted in a collaboration between the Washington Post, ABC News, and the research and consulting firm IPSOS, showed that 57 percent of Americans now believe AI is outright bad for society, while just 42 percent say it’s good.
And the ardent pessimists dwarf the bullish optimists. A full 17 percent think AI is in fact “extremely” bad, compared to a measly 2 percent who say it’s extremely good.
The poll, which gathered responses from over 2,500 adults, comes after months of remarkably alarmist rhetoric from the AI industry, even compared to its history of casually doomsaying about its own tech.
AI companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta, have each revealed incidents in which their agentic models went on rogue hacking sprees that targeted other companies and even government websites. Insiders, meanwhile, have made sensational claims about the existential danger posed by AI — and the reckless, and perhaps cultish, naïveté of the people building it.
These fears were met with calls to slow down AI development. Industry leaders haven’t agreed to such a slowdown, but they made a show of signing a non-binding agreement to regulate themselves after meeting with president Donald Trump last month.
Significant anti-AI sentiment, it’s worth noting, goes back years. But the latest revelations over the tech’s threat to cybersecurity and critical infrastructure have added more urgency and teeth to these concerns. An overwhelming 73 percent of Americans say there’s a high or very high risk of AI hacking secure computer systems, the poll found. A longstanding fear such as AI eliminating many jobs, meanwhile, has 65 percent of Americans viewing it as a high or very high risk.
A majority may view AI as a net negative, but there’re still sizable splits in opinion by demographic. Some 65 percent of Americans under 30 say AI is bad for society, for instance, while only 53 percent of Americans over 40 hold the same view.
Across political lines, 63 percent of Democrats and 58 percent of independents are in the negative societal impact camp, but only 51 percent of Republicans view AI this way.
On the flip side, Americans are feeling less convinced by the purported upsides of AI, with only 34 percent thinking there’s a big chance that it will make everyday tasks easier, and a paltry 13 percent believing it will create many new jobs.
One of the most vigorous outlets of AI pushback as been opposition to data centers, which the poll shows no signs of slowing down. A sweeping 66 percent of Americans oppose new data center construction in the US, with the share at an overwhelming 76 percent among Democrats and 50 percent among Republicans. The figures are higher when the threat is closer to home: 81 percent of Democrats and 58 percent of Republicans oppose a new center being built in their own community.
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