The AI Backlash Is Everything Everywhere All At Once

AI is now less popular than Elon Musk and the IRS combined. It gets worse.

Happy Thursday, Storytellers, and greetings from Brooklyn, where we’re absolutely delirious after the Knicks overcame a 29-point deficit to win Game 4 of the NBA Finals. I might have hired an Etsy Witch to curse the Spurs at halftime.

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On tap this week: The rapid rise of the backlash against generative AI, and five stories that reveal how bad it’s gotten.

The AI Backlash Is Everything Everywhere All at Once

Earlier this week, I got coffee with a friend whose use of AI is so savvy that I featured him in my new book.

“I’ve stopped using Claude for writing and editing completely,” he told me.

LinkedIn is the biggest lead channel for his business, and he realized that he needed to rip AI’s influence out of every post to stand out. He even stopped using AI for follow-up emails. “I wasn’t thinking about the decisions that I actually wanted to make.”

More and more, people I talk to are disillusioned with AI; the backlash has gone from a rumble of distant thunder to a hurricane rampaging on the shore. You see it in the headlines. University of Arizona graduates drowned Eric Schmidt with boos when he gassed up AI on stage; an anti-AI extremist threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s home. Nearly half of Gen Z workers are actively sabotaging their company’s AI initiatives. New York City parents are fighting back against AI in schools. And a deep hatred of AI and data centers is basically the only thing bringing the political left and right together.

An NBC News poll found that AI now has a lower approval rating than ICE. Amongst 18-34-year-olds, it’s at minus-44 points, making it less popular than Elon Musk and the IRS combined. Across surveys, consumers are far more concerned than excited about AI, with sentiment dropping year over year.

The shocking thing is that many corporate leaders seem to have no idea any of this is going on.

As a speaker and reporter, I spend a lot of time at marketing, tech, and AI conferences. My lungs are filled with recycled air; my blood is 4% lukewarm Diet Coke. Many execs at these events continue to hype AI, peacocking about their workflows and AI transformation. I’m not convinced they all believe it. After all, speaking ill of AI is dangerous, lest you be labeled a Luddite incapable of building an “AI-native team.” But the executive bubble does seem to be creating a reality-distortion field. A Columbia Business School survey recently found that 76% of execs believe their employees are enthusiastic about AI. Only 31% actually are.

The only role in the boardroom immune to the AI distortion field is CFOs, who are increasingly questioning rampant AI spending.

I believe that AI populism and the AI backlash will be one of the defining stories of the next few years—dominating marketing (with a rise of “anti-AI brands”), culture (as Gen Z and Alpha backlash taints AI as deeply uncool); the economy (will the bubble pop?), and politics, where we will likely see surprise “AI populist” candidates on both the left and the right.

This past week, I sat down with my Art of the Zag co-host, Shane Snow, to dissect five stories that perfectly capture the growing AI backlash. (And before you come at us in the comments as AI haters, note that Shane and I use the shit out of our Claude Max subscriptions every day and feel conflicted about it.)

We discussed:

1. Why AI is now less popular than ICE. For the past few years, AI boosters had an easy way to explain away anti-AI sentiment: People just hadn’t experienced the magic of AI yet! Several surveys showed that the more people used AI, the more they liked it. New data shows that may no longer be the case, which would be very bad news for the AI industry.

2. Why Gen Z booing AI boosters matters. Young people determine what’s cool. Anthropic and OpenAI need to grow by an unprecedented 496% by 2029 to justify the capex expenditures and data centers being built to support the AI industry. It’s hard to see that growth happening under any circumstance, but it’ll be damn near impossible if using AI becomes deeply uncool.

3. The intellectual backlash to the Jobpocalypse narrative. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have been breathlessly pushing an AI jobpocalypse narrative. Media darlings (and Art of the Zag faves) like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have been championing new research by University of Chicago researcher Alex Imas that claims that narrative is bullshit. Who’s right?

4. The story of how one Fortune 500 company accidentally burned HALF A BILLION DOLLARS on Claude Code tokens in one month, and why it’s leading to a pullback in corporate AI spending that could pop the AI bubble.

5. The AI revolt in NYC schools. Here in New York City, parents are livid after discovering that an AI reading app was training on kindergarteners’ voices and that middle schoolers are being handed Chromebooks loaded with AI tools that insist on doing their homework for them. It may just lead to a massive policy reversal by the city and an AI moratorium in schools. I just got home from a picnic for Max’s last day of nursery school, and let me tell you: Don’t underestimate the power of pissed-off parents in the AI populism wave.

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Tell great stories!

-Joe

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