Americans resent AI but cannot do without it
What happened
On 5 October 2026, MIT Technology Review published an article on Americans' contradictory attitude towards AI. Surveys show that most American adults believe AI's negative effects on individuals and society outweigh the positive, with young people especially pessimistic; yet usage figures are equally huge: ChatGPT reached 1 billion monthly active users in May, Gemini reached 950 million in July, and Pew data shows half of American adults have already used chatbots. The author argues that what people resent is not the technology itself but the pervasive way tech companies push it. The article also notes that more than 2,100 AI-related bills have been passed or proposed across all 50 states.
Written by AI from the reports · updated 11 d ago
Timeline
Follow the reports to see the event from each side.
- MIT Technology Review · AIPeople really hate AI, so why can’t they get enough?
Over the summer I talked to the CEO of Springboards, a startup building an LLM that’s designed to come up with a wider variety of responses than its mainstream rivals do.