Here's a paradox for you. Americans increasingly hate artificial intelligence, but they can't stop using it. Gen Z excitement about AI collapsed from 36% to 22% in a single year, according to Gallup. Anger rose from 22% to 31% over the same period. Meanwhile, the number of people admitting to using platforms like ChatGPT climbed from 48% in December 2025 to 56% in March 2026. So, this is not typical tech backlash where early adopters love something and everyone else ignores it. This is mass adoption paired with mass resentment. People are using AI tools while simultaneously believing that technology will harm society, cost them their jobs, and undermine creative work. I'm El. I have a PhD in computer science, and I analyze AI developments to understand what's actually happening beneath all of this hype. And what is happening right now is a sentiment collapse that is both broad-based and accelerating. The question isn't so much whether there is AI backlash. The data confirms it's real and growing. The question is more what is driving it and what it means for where this technology goes next.

Let me show you the trend because it is super stark. The share of Americans who believe AI will have a negative impact on society has steadily increased. 34% in December 2024, 40% in March 2025, 41% in April, 47% by June. Only 6% believe AI's impact will be very positive and 20% think it will be somewhat positive. When Pew Research asked Americans whether they were more excited or concerned about increased AI use in daily life, only 10% said they were more excited than concerned. An NBC poll found 46% negative sentiment towards AI, making it less popular than ICE and President Trump. Just let that sink in. Artificial intelligence is now one of the most unpopular things in America. And it's not just generalized anxiety. Specific concerns are spiking. The share of Americans very concerned about AI generated deep fakes rose from 58% to 63%. Concerns about increased human dependency on technology went from 45% to 50%. Worries about diminished creativity and drive climb from 44% to 49%. Gen Z is leading the anger. But here's what makes this backlash different from typical tech skepticism. It is informed, not ignorant. Stanford's 2026 AI index report found a massive disconnect between AI experts and the public. 56% of AI experts believe the technology will have a positive impact on the US over the next 20 years. Only 10% of the general public agrees. That doesn't sound like a knowledge gap only. It sounds more like a values gap. People understand what AI does. They just don't like it.

One of the biggest drivers of anti-AI sentiment is very straightforward. People think it's going to cost them their jobs, and they're not actually that wrong. AI was cited as a factor in nearly 55,000 layoffs in the US in 2025, according to data from Challenger Gray in Christmas. That is out of 1.17 million total layoffs, the highest level since the pandemic. Amazon announced 15,000 job cuts. Salesforce CEO Mark Benov said 4,000 customer support workers were let go because AI was already doing 50% of the work. Accenture and Lufansa cited AI in restructuring announcements, too. And worker anxiety is climbing in response. Employee concerns about job loss due to AI skyrocketed from 28% in 2024 to 40% in 2026. According to consultancy firm Mercer's global talent trends report, which surveyed 12,000 people worldwide, Gen Z workers are feeling this pressure most acutely. Surveys show that 18 to 24 year olds are 129% more likely than older workers to report fearing AI could make their jobs obsolete. And 49% of Gen Z job seekers believe AI has already diminished the value of their college education. Let's just think about what that means. You spend four years and tens of thousands of dollars on a degree and before you even enter the workforce, the skill you were trained for are being automated. Entry-level positions, the ones that teach you how to actually do the work are slowly disappearing. Fortune noted in a 2025 analysis that without junior roles providing foundational experience, organizations risk a long-term shortage of senior talent. Of course, the career ladder is slowly breaking and Gen Z is watching it happen in real time. Now, there is a debate about whether AI is actually causing these job losses or whether it's just a convenient excuse for layoffs in a tough economic climate. Otherwise, Deutsche Bank analysts suggest that AI redundancy washing, which is blaming cuts on AI to deflect criticism, will be a significant feature of 2026. Yale University's budget lab found that AI hasn't yet caused widespread job losses when you look at labor market data from 2022 to 2025. The share of workers in different jobs hasn't shifted massively since Chad GPT's debut. But here's the thing, perception matters a huge deal. After years of executive citing AI for headcount reductions, the public has just accepted the narrative. Whether AI is currently destroying jobs at scale is almost kind of beside the point. People believe it will and they're adjusting their sentiment accordingly.

Next up, we have to talk about the creative industry. If you're a writer, artist, or musician, the AI backlash is not abstract at all. It is existential. There are right now over 70 copyright infringement lawsuits filed by creators against AI companies. The biggest development of 2025 was Anthropic's $ 1.5 billion settlement in the BART's case, the largest copyright recovery in US history. Anthropic had downloaded millions of pirated books to train its models. And when the evidence became undeniable, they settled for approximately $3,000 per work, covering roughly 500,000 titles. Musicians are suing AI music generators. Country artist Tony Justice filed complaints against Suno and Udio, alleging the companies used his sound recordings without authorization and that their models reproduced exact or near exact replicas of his songs. Universal Music Group settled its lawsuit against UIO and established a licensing deal with an opt-in structure for artists. Visual artists are in court over AI image generators trained on their work without permission or compensation. and writers. The 2023 writer guilt of America strike, one of Hollywood's longest at 148 days, was fundamentally about AI. The central issue was whether studios could use AI to generate or rewrite scripts without fair compensation to human screenwriters. The agreement the WGA reached includes specific restrictions. AI cannot be considered a writer. Studios cannot use AI to write or adapt scripts without notice to and compensation for the human writers involved. Any AI general material provided to writers must be disclosed and cannot be treated as source material that reduces human creators credits or compensation. The underlying grievance across all these cases is essentially the same. AI companies took copyrighted data, used it to train models that can now generate similar content, and didn't ask permission or offer compensation from the perspective of working creators that is theft at industrial scale.

But you know, anti- AI sentiment isn't just ideological. It is also physical, playing out in towns and cities across the USA that are rejecting the infrastructure AI requires to function. According to a US data center moratorium tracker, 69 jurisdictions have now enacted bans or moratoriums on new data center construction. A year ago, that number was eight. Four of these bans are permanent. And the reasons are very concrete. Data centers massively increase electricity costs for residents, consume enormous amounts of water, and often bypass local democratic processes. Wholesale electricity prices have skyrocketed by up to 267% in some areas over the past 5 years as utility providers upgrade infrastructure to handle data center demand. But the costs are being passed equally to data centers and average consumers resulting in higher utility bills for everyone. In Michigan, Saline Township voted down a $16 billion OpenAI Oracle Stargate data center. The planning commission rejected it. The township board voted 4 to one against it. Two days later, the developer sued for exclusionary zoning. The township settled and construction began anyway. Residents who opposed the project felt steamrolled. One local resident told Fortune, I'm quoting, "I feel like I'm playing by a different rule book, like I'm playing baseball and they're playing football." In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis signed a law requiring data centers to cover the full cost of their own electricity and infrastructure instead of shifting those expenses to residential ratepayers. At the bill signing, DeSantis called AI consumer-facing slop and said the most wealthy companies in the history of the world shouldn't have individual Floridians subsidizing their operations. Between April and June 2025, 20 proposed data center projects worth a combined 98 billion dollars were blocked or delayed due to local resistance. Communities are realizing they're being asked to bear the cost. Higher electricity bills, water consumption, environmental impact while tech companies reap the profits and they're essentially saying no.

So what is happening here? Why is sentiment collapsing so fast? I think the simple answer is basically people's lived experience with AI is diverging sharply from the promises they were sold. The pitch was that AI would be a tool to augment human work, make us more productive, unlock creativity. The reality people are experiencing is job costs justified by AI, utility bills rising to subsidize data centers, creative work devalued because models trained on stolen content can generate knockoffs at scale. And critically, this is not people don't understand the technology. Stanford's AI index report shows the opposite. There is a massive gap between AI insiders who are optimistic and everyone else who are not. And it's not because the public lacks information. It is because they're evaluating AI based on different criteria. AI experts tend to think about capabilities, benchmarks, what the technology can actually do. The public thinks about jobs, costs, whether their kids education will be worth anything, whether artists can still make a living. And on those metrics, AI is failing to deliver benefits that justify the current costs. The backlash also reflects something much deeper, a sense that tech companies are bypassing democratic processes, enforcing this technology and people whether they like it or not. Michigan residents voted no on a data center. Construction started anyway. Writers went on a strike to protect their livelihoods. AI companies kept training on their work. Communities said, "We don't want to subsidize your electricity costs." tech companies sued or lobbied until they got what they wanted. This doesn't sound like resistance to innovation. That's resistance to having decisions imposed by actors with vastly more money and political power. Well, where does this go from here? The anti-AI sentiment we're seeing isn't a temporary backlash that will fade once people get used to it. The trend lines are going in the wrong direction for that narrative. Sentiment is worsening, not really stabilizing. The gap between insiders and the public is widening and not closing. And the backlash is manifesting in concrete ways. Lawsuits, strikes, moratoriums, legislation. This isn't just people complaining online. It is organized resistance with real consequences for how and where AI gets deployed. A recent survey found that 73% of Americans support requiring companies to implement safety measures and mandatory pre-deployment approval from a government board for advanced AI models. 72% want more regulation of the AI industry. 82% don't trust tech company executives to self-regulate. The public has basically decided they want AI controlled, not unleashed. Now whether that actually happens is of course a different question. Tech companies are spending record amounts to protect their interests and back industry friendly candidates. Billions are being poured into AI infrastructure whether communities like it or not. But the backlash is real. It's growing and it's based on legitimate grievances. Cost shifting, job displacement, copyright infringement, environmental impact, and the sense that this technology is being forced on people by actors who don't care about the consequences for ordinary workers and communities. AI evangelists keep insisting that resistance is just fear of the unknown, that people will come around once they see the benefits. But what if people have seen the current benefits, weigh them against the cost, and decided the trade-off just isn't worth it for them?