Democrats Must Oppose the AI Industry

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/power/2025-09-05-democrats-must-oppose-ai-industry/



In April, the Pew Research Center released polling showing only 17 percent of the American public thinks that so-called “artificial intelligence” technologies, like OpenAI’s signature ChatGPT, will have a positive effect on the country over the next 20 years. People were sharply negative on AI’s impact on the economy, education, the environment, the news, criminal justice, and arts and entertainment.

This is not an isolated finding. A January Axios poll found 72 percent of the public was pessimistic about AI technologies, and polling from YouGov shows that the three most common sentiments toward the technology are cautious (54 percent), concerned (47 percent), and skeptical (44 percent). Those negative perceptions ticked up this spring, while positive attitudes (impressed, hopeful, excited) have all fallen. The best poll for the industry is an outlier from NBC, which still only found voters evenly split on whether they like AI.

Perhaps the most telling poll comes out of Quinnipiac University, which sorted its respondents by income. Households with an income above $200,000 per year—the wealthiest 15 percent of Americans, according to the most recent Census Bureau data—thought AI would do more good than harm in their day-to-day lives by a 3-to-1 margin. But Americans earning below $50,000 thought AI would do more harm than good for them by a margin of 2-to-1.

Quinnipiac’s data confirms what we think most observers can intuit. The inescapable hype around AI technologies over the last few years has largely been an elite phenomenon, with business owners and technology moguls excited to slash their workforces and profit off of robot labor. Those at the bottom sense they’re on the chopping block as usual. Everyone else in the middle seemingly doesn’t quite know what to think, but is tilting toward the negative.

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[rampartd]

1. REGULATE

and let the bastards whine.

at the very least these things must be programmed with asimov's laws of robotics.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

2. Sharing profits & services will work. Opposing AI won't work. There are too many forces behind it. We can shape it

AI is going to advance. A lot. Not smoothly and not immediately. But the profit and geopolitical forces behind it are too strong to oppose with much success. However taxing and regulation can work.

Democrats need to demand and get a better distribution of wealth and income. AI is a change that will generate lots of riches. Right now, wealth and income inequality is at historically high and unsustainably high levels. This is a great opportunity to restore a better balance. The peaceful way.

[KPN]

12. All good points. We can't just oppose "because".

It’s inevitable. Gotta do the best we can to make it work the best we can — which is better by more than lightyears than what the Rs will settle for.

[Alice Kramden]

3. AI is costing a fortune in electricity

And it's an ecological nightmare

[hunter]

5. Rising electricity costs kill people...

... especially lower income people living in places where air conditioning becomes a necessity as a direct consequence of global warming.

[msongs]

4. twenty something music ppl I know love it even tho it will put them out of business. who needs young music when spotify

flood the market with AI music costing almost nothing to make

[usonian]

6. Merely trying to regulate it cost a good chunk of the last election. Maybe "just enough"

Propose:

1. Charging more for gargantuan power users, and the cost of infrastructure, rather than less, and letting Joe "charge my laptop" pay for it.

2. Abusing the holy crap out of it. AI companies have a great taste for swill and russian propaganda bots (proven). I can't give details. Hacking info is against DU rules.

[Silent Type]

7. Too late now, other than requiring some statement that it's AI.

[Orrex]

9. For real. The toothpaste is out of the tube.

Trying to backtrack on it now will make Democrats seem hopelessly technophobic and unelectably out of touch.

[hunter]

8. The technology billionaire class largely turned against the Democratic Party...

... as soon as they heard the word "regulation" applied to AI and cryptocurrency.

These fuckwits really do think they are the good guys and that their libertarian technology fetishes will somehow save the world. (Well, maybe not Elon Musk. He's just a grifter who got really good at sucking up our tax dollars for useless sci-fi crap that will not make the world a better place.)

With any luck the AI bubble will burst covering them all with a stinky goo they can't wash off.

[JCMach1]

10. Becoming the Luddite Party moves in the direction of extinction

Technology is a tool. USE IT and regulate when needed.

And yes, that includes AI.

[eppur_se_muova]

13. The Luddites may not have been who you think they were.

Luddites were protesting against changes they thought would make their lives much worse, changes that were part of a new market system. Before this time, craftspeople would do their work for a set price, the usual price. They did not want this new system that involved working out how much work they did, how much materials cost, and how much profit there would be for the factory owner.

As with AI, the biggest threat to the weavers was that machinery was eliminating their jobs, while doing nothing to provide them with an alternative way to make a living. The popular conception that they were simply 'anti-progress' or 'anti-automation' is a canard. They saw well-paying jobs disappearing, and no one in authority seemed to care. Sound familiar ?

The Luddites lost because there was just too much profit to be made from automation, and it would be used to capture political power which all but forced its adoption. Again, sound familiar ?

[JCMach1]

14. The point is they lost everything and gained nothing in the teeth of a paradigm shift

That leads to extinction political or otherwise.

[RainCaster]

11. we can all do a little

I don't have much influence, but I have disabled AI access to all my websites. They don't get to learn anything from my sites. Of course I have disabled the AI associated with my Google and Microsoft accounts on all my systems.