Democrats Must Oppose the AI Industry [View all]

[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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