The Rise of the Anti-AI Movement

0:00Today on the AI Daily Brief, we are talking about the rise of the anti-AI movement. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.

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1:07Unfortunately for me, it turns out that the blizzard's path and timing was nearly identical to our family's flight back from South America, meaning of course that it got pushed and I am having to record this show in advance. Now this kind of works out because this is a topic I've wanted to do for a little while now and was planning to do sometime this week, but this is a pre-record. I'm actually recording this on Sunday, February 22nd. Unless something dramatic happens, I should be back tomorrow with our normal format. So what we are talking about today is the anti-AI movement. And to be honest, calling it a movement might be a little overstated at the moment.

1:38It is certainly not one big organized thing. The reasons for it are not monolithic. And it would be reasonable for one to ask to what extent this is just driven by media narrative. It is certainly the case that for the last few years, since the launch of ChatGPT, we've had a pretty never-ending cycle of AI hype and enthusiasm as the main media story around it, followed by some type of skeptical narrative when that excited narrative fails to be exciting anymore. And the media is all over this one right now. Just this weekend from the New York Times, we got a piece called People Love the Dotcom Boom, The AI Boom?

2:09Not So Much. In it, author David Streitfield asks, tech leaders are beginning to worry about the public's underwhelming enthusiasm for their plans to remake the world with artificial intelligence. Will that burst the bubble? And then of course, even more commented on the Time magazine cover from last week called The People Versus AI. The cover features nine headshots of people who, for various reasons, find themselves opposed to AI at least as it's currently constituted, forming the basis for a large cover story about this emergent political and societal force. For some, they believe that this is all somewhat deserving of scorn.

2:41Lumps on X shared a remixed version of the Time magazine cover, this one featuring nine cave people, with the headline being The People vs. The Wheel. Grunts from the silent majority dragging rocks and rolling is a drag. I've also seen plenty of versions of this with The People vs. The Internet or The People vs. Any Other Technology. Now, of course, what's being implied here is that with any new technology, there is always some amount of resistance that eventually looks silly and short-sighted in retrospect. And for those who are most involved in this technology, I do understand the frustration of feeling assailed for building or working on a thing that you think is going to be really positive, but where it feels like so many people are genuinely mad at you just for doing what you're doing.

3:19And yet, I think it would be a mistake to view the rise of anti-AI sentiment as simply a media narrative. There is a huge and growing canon of studies that show particularly Americans have extreme skepticism around AI. A recent YouGov study found that 58 % of Americans said that they don't have trust in AI versus 35 % who do. 45 % of Americans said that they think that AI's effect on the economy will be mostly negative versus just 16 % who think that it will be more positive than negative. And nearly two-thirds of Americans in that YouGov poll, 63%, think AI will lead to a decrease in the number of jobs available in the U.S.

3:55versus just 7 % who think that it will increase the number of jobs. In a Pew Research poll from last year, the U.S. ranked dead last in terms of the ratio of citizens who were more concerned versus more excited about AI. Only 10 % of those polled said that they were more excited than concerned versus 50 % who said they were more concerned than excited. So the point here is that whatever reasons you want to ascribe to it, and even if you think that it is overblown in the media narrative, there is definitely a base level of skepticism and concern among Americans when it comes to artificial intelligence.

4:27And what's more, it seems to be growing. A number of videos out of New Brunswick, New Jersey, went viral on X after hundreds of citizens showed up to a planning meeting about a data center and got the project canceled. That video shared just a couple of days ago got 5 million views. Organizer Ben Zobiak, who posted the video, wrote, A data center in New Brunswick was canceled tonight when hundreds of residents showed up. When we fight big tech and private equity, we win. AI curator Andrew Curran writes, After three years, it seems to me that public anti-AI sentiment in the West is now at its highest point.

4:57Political commentator and statistician Nate Silver has been talking about this a lot. He recently tweeted, If AI produces unprecedented levels of technological disruption on timescales that are an order of magnitude or two faster than anything in human history, it's going to be an unprecedented political fight. And for what it's worth, the timelines potentially line up with the 2028 US election. He also talks about how this white-collar first disruption doesn't have political precedent. He writes, usually these transitions would take decades and not affect white-collar workers first, who have more political power.

5:27Displacement of narrow classes of blue-collar workers, e.g. coal miners, even if most of society would benefit, usually causes huge political battles. Here, the displacement would be much broader, the benefits are less clear, and the people displaced are more influential. In another tweet more specifically focused on the data center concern, Nate writes, opposition to building data centers might be irrational at the micro scale, They're just going to be built somewhere else. But at the mesoscale, people are profoundly doubtful about whether AI will broadly benefit society, and that's not so irrational at all.

5:55People don't like being forced into prisoners' dilemmas they didn't ask for, and it is macro level rational for them to feel resistance and indeed resentment towards that. Joe Weisenthal from Bloomberg's Odd Lots, perhaps somewhat provocatively, as is his style on Twitter, writes, This is a good take. I haven't heard anyone in the AI world credibly articulate why the average person should assume it will make their life better. Typically, they say the opposite. it. Ethan Mollick writes, I would add that when imagining backlash, people think of Doon's Butlerian Jihad or Luddites. But what those fights actually looked like during the previous industrial revolutions were about regulation, redistribution, nationalization, unions, and safety nets.

6:30Could expect similar. Now, it will come as no surprise that I have very different feelings than most of the anti-AI folks when it comes to the substance of the issues. But I do not believe that the concerns are not legitimate, nor do I think it behooves the AI industry to ignore these voices and these concerns. In fact, I think the leaders of the AI industry have done a spectacularly bad job of both acknowledging and addressing real concerns that people have. We may want things that are exciting to us to be exciting to others, to have things that are self-evident or obvious to us be self-evident and obvious to others.

7:03But that's not how the world works. And if we acknowledge and believe that the impact scale of this technology is going to be circa everyone, we have to be willing to engage with circa everyone. When I saw the Time cover, I absolutely cringed inside. Not because I'm unwilling or even disinterested in AI critique, but because usually what the media puts in front of us is quite bad. I actually came away from the piece, however, feeling, believe it or not, pretty optimistic. Not exclusively, but by and large, the people they focused on as their reference points for the cover story were not ideologues or careerist skeptics.

7:37They were people who in many cases aren't even necessarily anti-AI by disposition, but who find themselves concerned with some specific impact of the technology and advocating for some specific change in policy around it. In most of these cases, I found the concerns leveled in good faith in ways that were actually solvable. And so what I thought would be useful is to actually try to break apart the anti-AI movement into constituent categories. So we're not talking about this thing in monolithic terms. Like I said at the beginning, I think this is much less an organized movement, and much more right now pockets of concerns and resistance that could at some point easily coalesce into a larger political force.

8:12So let's quickly go through a handful of different categories and try to understand what their big concerns are. We'll start first with the AI safety folks, the people who are concerned about X-risk or existential risk, who talk to each other about what their P-doom is, P-doom being probability of doom, that AI ends us all. These are the voices that you will sometimes find AI folks critiquing as living in the realm of the sci-fi. It's the paperclip maximalists who argue for why super intelligent AI would be likely to end humanity, not even necessarily out of malice, but because we stood in the way of accomplishing some goal that they were trying to achieve.

8:46The voice of this group was much louder right after ChatGPT was launched, probably for the reason that you could get crazy headlines about how the robots were going to kill us all, and folks like Eliezer Yudkowsky to come in your magazine and write an essay to that effect. Now, just like within the anti-AI movement overall, and frankly on the opposite side of the AI booster train, there is a massive spectrum of folks even just within this concern range. Many of them operate from a place of genuinely good faith, which creates much more room for discussion even if you fundamentally disagree with everything that they think.

9:15You can go check out the AI Safety Memes account on Twitter as an example, or even check out Laurent Shapira's Doom Debates podcast. I think even if one fundamentally disagrees with the concerns animating these folks, it's worth having a bit of epistemic humility about all of this given that none of us know the actual future. Now, an interesting note about these folks is that unlike some of the others in the anti-AI space, they actually quite agree with the accelerationists on how powerful AI is. It's just they're very concerned about what the implications of that are. Interestingly, I don't really think that these folks have been as much of a driver of the conversation as it might've seemed if you looked just in the first six months after ChatGPT was launched.

9:51Going back to that tweet by Andrew Curran about how public anti-AI sentiment is now at its highest point, he continued, the primary driver by far is not X-risk but concerns about employment and the impact on art. Safety advocacy might have been more effective and might now be in a much stronger position if they had emphasized societal and economic impacts more than X-risk over the last few years. Moving on to the next category of the anti-AI folks are what we might call the capability skeptics. These are the folks you see running around on social networks claiming things like AI is just fancy autocomplete.

10:21Demonstrating just how much the anti-AI space is not one thing, these folks disagree with the safetiest because if AI is just fancy autocomplete, it's obviously not going to take over the world and turn us all into paperclips. If you're looking for an example of this, one of the most prominent examples is Gary Marcus. And honestly, believe it or not, this is the group that I kind of have the most frustration with. The people who've been lobbying these arguments take advantage of every time the media narrative shifts against AI to update their previous essay about why AI has plateaued, despite the fact that it's plateaued at a point significantly more advanced than the last time they said the same thing.

10:54I think in general, the capability skeptics are pedantic, pretty viciously intellectually rigid and unable to change their perception based on new evidence, and ultimately, almost entirely ignorable. I don't think we should mistake the fact that a few people can make careers by being the token skeptics on the panel, with their perspective actually being useful. And the reason that I have the most frustration and animosity towards this group is that these are the ones who so many normal folks want to be right. They want them to be right so they can safely ignore this thing that they don't particularly like until it fades like NFTs.

11:26I genuinely believe that many people will not engage meaningfully with AI because the capability skeptics aid and abet their natural disinclination to do so. And because of that, those people will be extremely far behind when it comes to AI usage. They will be the least adaptable to AI disruption, the least likely to benefit from new opportunities that AI creates. And because of that, I genuinely believe that the capability skeptics will cause more economic harm when it comes to individual people than the AI hypesters who overstate things in order to sell their products. Now, to the extent that there's one subset of this group that have at least a reasonable point is the group that isn't trying to say every five minutes that AI is on some new plateau, but who do caution that we should turn the volume down on everything just a few notches because the actual diffusion pattern by which it makes it into the workplace and into society is inevitably going to be much longer than we think.

12:17I don't even know if you can really count them alongside the capability skeptics. Maybe a better framing would be the timeline skeptics, but they I think have a much more reasonable point.

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16:05Next up, a group that has some overlap with the skeptics but are ultimately a different thing. These we'll call the AI bubblers. They're not necessarily or at least a priori skeptical of the capabilities of AI. In fact, many of them are convinced in the long-term power and disruption potential of AI. They're skeptical of the business side of things. They're skeptical of where value is going to get realized. They're skeptical of whether today's business models can support the deal and debt structures that are financing the industry. They're skeptical of the market's valuations of these companies.

16:31Maybe the most prominent of these, at least right now, when it comes to a media profile, is Michael Burry of Big Short fame. One of the things that I've always said on this show is that it's extremely important to break apart skepticism of the technology itself from skepticism of the market's interaction with the technology. It would be a completely coherent intellectual position, in other words, for someone to think that AI is going to, and even is now, radically changing things, and still not think the market is pricing the companies behind it correctly. The next category we'll call the artist advocates.

17:00Now, in some cases, these are folks in the artistic or entertainment fields who are frustrated that AI is doing the things that they and their peers used to do. Others are concerned about copyright and IP more generally. And then, of course, a big group of these folks are kind of just normal folks who aren't necessarily artists themselves, who just have a general uneasiness of the fairness of things, which is not something that, for example, Supreme Court decisions about copyright and AI are going to solve. The next grouping doesn't exactly describe a motivation for disliking AI, but a shared organizing principle that cuts across many people who don't like AI, which is to viscerally dislike the outputs of AI.

17:36We'll call these the slop secessionists, and it's the people like the millions of commentators on Time Magazine's 1776 project by Darren Aronofsky, where they're using AI to go create mini documentaries about that pivotal year in American history, with all of the YouTube commenters basically just absolutely railing on it for looking like, in their estimation, AI slop. Like I said, I don't think that people are anti-AI because they dislike slop. I think they dislike and consider the output of AI slop because they're already anti-AI, but it's enough of a cultural force that it is worth identifying on its own terms.

18:08Another group, which has a significant amount of attention, particularly in religious and conservative circles, are the folks who are really concerned about the impact of AI on children and teens. They're concerned about human relationship structures. They're concerned about the impact of AI on child development. They're concerned about what happens when people want to talk to AI girlfriends and boyfriends more than real-life girlfriends and boyfriends. I found that this category of concern is invisible to many who aren't around the circles where it's important, but incredibly pertinent, in fact, maybe the very top of the list, in certain groups and communities.

18:39The data center deniers we touched on at the beginning of the show and are a growing political force of people who are specifically pushing back on data centers showing up in their community. This group, of course, overlaps with the environmental activists who are concerned about AI's impact on the environment through things like the consumption of water for data centers, as well as just the general electricity profile of the industry. But these two are slightly different. Whereas the environmentally concerned folks are thinking on macro scale, many of the people that are showing up at data center protests are just focused on very close to home issues like the actual or potential rise of their electricity bills.

19:13Now, I think the category that is by far the biggest, most broad-based, and has potentially the biggest political footprint is those who are concerned about the job displacement potential of AI. Anyone who listens to this show will have heard me talk about this quite a bit, so I don't think we need to get too deep into this. Simply put, the concern here is that if AI does everything better than us, what jobs are there left for people? Now, I actually have lots of answers to that, but the point of today's episode is not to answer the concerns of all these different categories. It's just to acknowledge that they exist, that they are in many cases growing, and that they're real positions that real people have, not just some sidelong concerns for internet debates.

19:49Now, one interesting subcategory of the folks concerned about job displacement, which we see in the timepiece, are the folks who aren't just generally concerned about things like white-collar job disruption, but have specific issues and criticisms with the way that AI is being implemented in particular workplaces. An example of this from the timepiece is nurse Hannah Drummond. Now, based on Time's profile, which is of course all I know about Hannah, it doesn't seem to me like she's some ideologue who rejects AI on principle. It's that she has specific concerns with how it's used in her field, which she understandably feels like she has some ground-level lived experience insight into.

20:23Time writes, Drummond helped nurses at 17 facilities in the HCA hospital system, including her own, win AI protections in their most recent contract, including a provision requiring hospitals to give registered nurses a say in how new technologies related to patient care are implemented. Drummond points to concerns that nurses have had where the improper use of AI has not only been not helpful but actively harmful. One example she gave was of an AI tool that was designed to automate shift handoffs that had assigned a patient with COVID alongside another who was immunocompromised, which created obviously big risks for the immunocompromised patient.

20:55Drummond Time writes doesn't want to ban AI from hospitals but says there need to be strict controls around its use. She says,