The public outrage over the tech industry’s obsession with AI is starting to boil over — and the pitchforks are coming out.
Most recently, a man allegedly lobbed a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s house. Days earlier, a councilman in Indianapolis said that somebody had fired a dozen bullets at his house, with a handwritten note reading “No Data Centers” left on his doorstep.
A similar story is playing out across swathes of rural America, with small towns continuing a years-long effort to keep environmentally damaging data centers that put a huge strain on water availability and the power grid out of their communities.
Earlier this week, voters in a small town in Missouri led a revolt, firing half of their city council over a recently-approved $6 billion data center deal.
In short, public backlash over AI has long broken the confines of snarky online commentary. Residents are starting to stand up to what tech leaders continue to claim is a technological revolution, while workers are actively rebelling after being forced train their AI replacements.
The public tone is notably starting to shift, as journalist Brian Merchant noted in a recent blog post, with some politicians even publicly throwing their weight behind moratoriums on data center development.
Whether the public will eventually reap the benefits of the industry’s enormous investments remains as dubious as ever. As Axios points out, the industry is struggling to agree on a cohesive narrative, with OpenAI arguing in a controversial industrial policy paper published earlier this month that we could soon live in a society where the tax burden shifts from human labor to capital, while workers benefit from a four-day workweek.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, on the other hand, continues to emphasize that AI poses a massive risk to society and needs to be controlled at all costs.
The widening schism between optimism and disillusionment is forcing AI companies into damage control mode.
Their attempts to regain control over the narrative are hard to overlook. Just days before the New Yorker published an unflattering exposé about Altman, which painted the billionaire as a liar and skilled manipulator, OpenAI announced it had bought the Technology Business Programming Network (TBPN), a business and tech podcast company that’s been referred to as “SportsCenter for Silicon Valley.”
Meanwhile, Altman shared a photo last week of his one-year-old son “in the hopes that it might dissuade the next person from throwing a Molotov cocktail at our house, no matter what they think about me.”
The billionaire called the New Yorker exposé an “incendiary article about me,” which he claimed to have initially “brushed” aside.
Nonetheless, despite of a brewing revolt across the country, Altman doubled down, arguing that he’s “extremely proud that we are delivering on our mission.”
But considering the sheer amount of goodwill the industry has lost in a matter of months, the public is increasingly refusing to subscribe to OpenAI’s new world order.
More on AI backlash: There’s a Mass Rebellion Against AI in the Workplace
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