People really hate AI, so why can’t they get enough? Around the world, a love/hate attitude toward AI is very much the vibe right now. The CEO of Springboards, a startup building an LLM, said something that’s been stuck in my head: “We’re a self-loathing AI company.”

Public feelings are souring fast. According to Pew Research Center, more adults in the US see AI as a negative than a positive. The pessimism is strongest among the young. More than half of people worldwide say AI products and services make them nervous, according to Stanford University. Yet, the number of people using AI is still skyrocketing. ChatGPT hit a billion monthly users in May, and Google DeepMind’s Gemini logged 950 million users in July.

This is a picture of two contradictory truths: a lot of people really dislike AI but a lot of people cannot get enough of it. The more people use AI, the more negative their opinions about it will be. The Global North, where adoption is highest, skews pessimistic. In the Global South, where adoption levels are lower, people are more optimistic.

When people say they hate AI, it’s not the technology they dislike, but the relentless drive of the companies behind it to push the tech upon us in as many ways as possible. With social media, billions flocked to Facebook and Twitter despite mounting techlash. With AI, there’s still a chance for people to have some sway. There’s more political appetite for regulation, and with open-source alternatives, there’s more consumer choice and market pressure.

Trillion-dollar companies are hard to move, but what comes next is not as inevitable as those companies often imply. We need clarity about what AI can and cannot do, and a technology that’s not sold as if it’s about to take over the world.