Unreasonably wealthy AI plutocrats are pouring billions of dollars into US elections.
Elon Musk alone has pumped more than $445 million into Republican campaigns ahead of the midterms, after spending a near-equal sum to get president Donald Trump elected in the last election cycle. Leading The Future, a Super PAC backed by OpenAI and Palantir cofounders and prominent tech venture capitalists including Marc Andreessen, has amassed $140 million to dole out to pro-AI candidates.
But all that money doesn’t seem to be helping the AI industry’s interests, because its image is still in the toilet.
A new analysis from Guardrails Action, an AI accountability advocacy group, found that voters in key battleground states still harbor mostly negative feelings towards the AI industry, with the tech being such a toxic topic that it’s potentially driving voters to cross the aisle.
The survey, reported by Inc, questioned over 3,000 likely voters in Iowa, Michigan, and Ohio — states where close Senate races are unfolding — about their thoughts on AI.
AI, the results showed, is a political landmine, with even a whiff of Big Tech money being potentially disastrous for a candidate’s image.
Three quarters of the likely voters said that they would be less apt to vote for a candidate if they found out they had accepted a donation from an AI Super PAC.
Some felt even more strongly than that. A quarter said they would switch parties to vote for a candidate who took a strong stance against AI companies and data center construction.
“We found that the AI Super PACs were more toxic with voters than Wall Street, cryptocurrency or AIPAC,” Charles Blaettler, political director of Guardrails Alliance, a PAC that combats AI spending that the advocacy group is part of, told Inc. “The influence of AI money on elections and politics sits at this nexus of the anxieties that people are feeling about AI, and this increased disgust people have around corruption and special interest money and politics.”
Ironically, this seems to be because voters are convinced by some of the noise coming out of the industry itself. Many luminaries in the industry have pushed doomy narratives about their tech destroying civilization, wiping out jobs, and possibly being conscious — while companies including Anthropic and OpenAI warn about their AIs going on rogue hacking sprees.
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