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Most Americans don't trust AI – or the people in charge of it (2025)
- tim-tday 5mo agoNor should they. Not trusting the untrustworthy is a sign of intelligence.
- Razengan 5mo ago> Most Americans They asked 174.6 million people?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- Kapura 5mo agoyou should ask your flatterbox about random sampling
- perching_aix 5mo agooh, 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
- Razengan 5mo agoMost people don't trust in random sampling
- _blk 5mo agoprobably 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.
- add-sub-mul-div 5mo agoI 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.
- LastTrain 5mo agoIf it was crammed down our throats in the same way by different people we’d still hate it just as much.
- elictronic 5mo agoIt being made by anyone linked to Venture Capital or any publicly traded company also are non-starters at this point.
- jeroenhd 5mo agoThere 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.
- advael 5mo agoI 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
- SpicyLemonZest 5mo agoYou 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.
- ReptileMan 5mo agoAnd yet all of them use it...
- Larrikin 5mo agoHaving 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.
- simianwords 5mo agoIt’s solving open problems in mathematics that stumped humans.
- mcv 5mo ago"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.
- arvid-lind 5mo agoIt 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.
- danielrmay 5mo agoWorth noting: article posted Apr 8, 2025
- ares623 5mo agoI'm curious how much has public opinion changed since then.
- clumsysmurf 5mo agoNot much, it seems https://www.axios.com/2026/05/17/ai-backlash-polling-sentiment https://www.axios.com/2026/05/17/ai-backlash-polling-sentime...
- Kapura 5mo agoif 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.
- cuu508 5mo agoWhat is stans and pols?
- Razengan 5mo agoCringespeak against whatever the poster is really really butthurt about.
- NiloCK 5mo agoA stan is a supporter/booster of whatever. I do not remember the origin. Pol here is abbreviated politician.
- csallen 5mo agoComes from the Eminem song Stan, about an obsessed fan named Stan.
- EA-3167 5mo agoIt's also a portmanteau of "Stalker" and "Fan" allegedly, although my first awareness of it was the Eminem song you mentioned.
- javascriptfan69 5mo agofrom the eminem song stan (also possibly from super-fan)
- HDBaseT 5mo ago
- tqi 5mo agoTurns out media fear mongering for clicks works
- javascriptfan69 5mo agoWhat 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.
- csallen 5mo agoMy 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.
- javascriptfan69 5mo agoThese 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.
- gdulli 5mo ago> 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."
- tqi 5mo agoHow can something be simultaneously useless to the average person and likely to create massive joblessness?
- Mistletoe 5mo agoNow if they could just vote for politicians and a political party that will do something about it…we might get somewhere.
- socalgal2 5mo agoThis 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
- Papazsazsa 5mo agoI use the internet but I don't trust it.
- altmanaltman 5mo agoverge 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
- tempaccount5050 5mo agoIf 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.
- rsoto2 5mo agohow 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
- ElProlactin 5mo agoLarge 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.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- lkrubner 5mo agoThe 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.
- doom2 5mo agoIt 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?
- ChrisArchitect 5mo ago(2025) Misleading OP
- EA-3167 5mo agoTo be entirely fair the sentiment isn’t improving.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- vanceferry 5mo ago[flagged]
- TitaRusell 5mo agoThe delusional rants of Palantir are not helping. Besides people aren't dumb- the whole point about AI is to replace organic employees!
- jdw64 5mo ago[dead]
- perarneng 5mo agoNobody 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.
- Frieren 5mo ago> 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.
- toshikatsu-oga 5mo ago[dead]
- vintermann 5mo agoI 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.
- jetsamflotsam 5mo agoYeah I'm not sure how to put this into words either, but I feel you. Do you know of any good AI "thought-leader" that's sensible and not AI-pilled or a complete doomer? Some reasonable middle-ground that helps us navigate an era of immense technological innovation?
- CuriousSkeptic 5mo agoTristan Harris?