The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis
The Rise of the Anti-AI Movement
24 Feb 2026
Chapter 1: What is the anti-AI movement and why is it gaining traction?
Today 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. All right, friends, quick notes before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, Robots and Pencils, Scrunch, AIUC, and Blitzy.
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Chapter 2: How has media narrative shaped public perception of AI?
If you live anywhere near New York right now, you know we are just coming off of getting truly walloped by what is predicted to be one of the biggest blizzards in the last five years.
Unfortunately 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 prerecord.
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. It 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.
The People vs. A.I. 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.
Lumps on X shared a remixed version of the Time magazine cover, this one featuring nine cave people, with the headline being the people versus 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 versus the internet or the people versus 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. And 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.
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Chapter 3: What are the main concerns driving the anti-AI sentiment?
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, 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, 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 meso scale, people are profoundly doubtful about whether AI will broadly benefit society, and that's not so irrational at all.
People don't like being forced into prisoner's 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. Ethan Malek writes, I would add that when imagining backlash, people think of Dune'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. Could expect similar. Now, it'll 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. But 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.
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Chapter 4: Who are the key groups within the anti-AI movement?
The 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.
You can go check out the AI Safety Memes account on Twitter as an example, or even check out Liran 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 have seemed if you looked just in the first six months after ChatGPT was launched.
Going 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.
Demonstrating just how much the anti-AI space is not one thing, these folks disagree with the safetyists 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.
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Chapter 5: What role does economic anxiety play in the anti-AI movement?
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Chapter 6: How do concerns about data centers reflect broader anti-AI sentiments?
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.
Now, 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. We'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.
Another 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.
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Chapter 7: What impact does AI have on job displacement and employment?
Now the last category of the anti-AI folks that I wanted to discuss is once again kind of a catch-all, and we'll call the big tech haters. There are a bunch of flavors of this. One flavor that's increasingly popular in political rhetoric is the tech billionaires as partisan villains.
This is of course more prominent, although not exclusively prominent, on the left, and is aided and abetted by tech's loud shift towards Trump in the most recent election cycle, as well as the very visible involvement of people like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk on a national political stage.
There are folks for whom hold aside any idea of Marc Andreessen as a supervillain, just have concerns in general about how much power the big tech companies have accrued.
And again, going back to the core idea at the heart of this episode of having humility even around positions that one doesn't hold, it is absolutely the case that up until the last generation, we had never had companies that touched billions of people in the way that big tech companies do.
Part of the reason that it's so hard to regulate big tech is that networks and network effects don't operate in the same way that previous types of companies did. And however one wants to resolve them, there are lots of legitimate questions around the balance of powers between civil society, governments, and companies, with big tech being a quintessential example.
Now, one group, which I actually think explains an extraordinary amount of AI animosity, is the folks who look back now, 20 years on from the advent of social media, who believe that not only has social media not particularly helped us, but in fact, that the world is actively worse for it existing.
Matthew Iglesias wrote about this recently, saying, All discussions about AI happen in the shadow of the tremendous and very sincere optimism about the cultural impact of social media that existed 15 to 25 years ago.
I think that even people who are very technology forward and progressive have massive concerns about the last generation of technology and social media, which you can see in the way that millennial parents are handling social media for their kids. I have a four, almost five year old and a seven year old, and none of the parents in and around our community
are even considering giving their kids smartphones when they're young. We'll see how this changes in practice, but right now, pretty much all the parents I know who are not, I will be clear, Luddite anti-technology folks, many of them work in the technology field, but not a one of them wants their 12 or 13 year old interacting with Instagram.
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Chapter 8: How can the AI industry address public concerns effectively?
Some are planning to destroy data centers and the people who build this stuff. That anger and backlash might not be reaching your floor, but it reaches the engineers and builders doing the actual work. The CEO of the most visible AI company should not frame humans as inefficient compute units.
Your role as a leader is to show how AI solves real problems for humanity, not to reduce human life to an energy accounting problem from a comfortable position. Speaking to Sam directly, he concludes, You're the leader of OpenAI, and whether you chose it or not, you represent everyone building in AI right now. Every word you say shapes how the world sees this technology and the people behind it.
Please act like it. Now, I wanted to do this episode to break apart the different elements of anti-AI sentiment right now. because I think that as we get more precise about what people's concerns are, we can do more to address them. And like I indicated at the beginning, call me naive, but I think there's more room for optimism than people might think, even in the critique.
Coming back to the nine folks profiled in this Time magazine piece, what you don't have in there is anyone claiming that an army of robots is going to rise up and kill us all for some unknown reason. You don't have anyone talking about AI bubbles and concerns about market pricing, or people giving the line that, well, actually, AI isn't all that good.
Instead, you have folks like Hannah Drummond that we just profiled, who aren't unwilling to engage with AI in their field. They just want to ensure that it's actually helpful. Austin-based pastor Michael Grayson is very demonstratively not AI on principle, but worried about teen chatbot dependency in the loneliness epidemic.
Muskogee Nation activists Jordan Harmon and Mackenzie Roberts are concerned with data centers, but not because data centers are a priori bad, because in the specific area that they work, they're getting tangled up with sovereign and native land rights. Georgia Public Service Commission member Alicia Johnson, again, is not actually against AI.
She wants the way that data centers get built to be economically fair. The way that increased energy generation capacity used to be brought online, where the cost of setting up new generation was passed on to local consumers, very obviously doesn't work when those consumers aren't the beneficiary, but all that new power goes to a data center. But that is an unbelievably solvable issue.
And frankly, the fact that it hasn't been solved yet is, I think, a massive failure of both policy and imagination from the people who are building the data centers. There is absolutely no reason, with the economic structures being what they are, that data centers couldn't be some of the most pro-community, positively engaged types of businesses wherever they operate.
By the way, even Donald Trump is on this train, increasingly pushing the AI operators to make commitments to ensure that they are better stewards for the communities that their data centers operate within. A last point of optimism, as we conclude, is that right now, the political discourse around AI has not hardened.
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