An AI Hate Wave Is Here

I actually completely disagree, and think that AI hate is just going to grow. My take is:

1. The public response resembles the stages of grief, and people are fluctuating between denial (AI isn't really that smart) and anger (AI is horrible).

2. Your perception of something tend to be shaped by the sum of your experiences with it, and a lot of the exposure to AI is via fake, scams, bots, and low efforts content (AI slop).

3. I think that the fear of losing your job and your life's stability is there, but it's not yet as common as it should be in the general public. I expect that to be the main driver of AI hate, and that will be a lot fiercer than the current hate, and could lead to a civil war or worse. Depending on AI progression.

4. There is also a lot of tribalism involved. We live in a polarized society, and many people adapt their opinions to the opinion of the group they identify with. That itself drives anger towards AI, as it is part of the greater cause.

Anti-AI propaganda is false-flag. AI is going to happen. The only question is whether it will benefit everyone or just the rich. Best way for the rich to ensure they own it is to convince the poors that AI is a monster, so they don’t demand it for themselves, and instead fight pointless battles they are guaranteed to lose. Folks need to wake up and start talking about a post-scarcity world where machines do all the work. You can have Star Trek or Elysium.

The piece doesn't seem to refute the key claims made by The Economist, namely that Gen-Z has higher inflation-adjusted incomes than previous generations. It's biggest criticism seems to be:

> The Economist piece and kindred articles are good examples of how to lie with statistics. You can show that the typical 25-year-old’s income outpaces boomers’ income when they were 25 only by failing to adjust for inflation and the rising costs of life’s necessities, or using averages rather than medians.

But the Economist did use inflation-adjusted median earnings in its analysis of incomes by age among different generations. The Economist cited the median after-tax income, adjusted for inflation. (https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,quality=10...) I'm not sure why this author seems to think that the Economist is failing to adjust for inflation or not using medians, when it says so quite clearly in their graphs.

The Prospect article also says that home ownership among under-35s has gone down, and links to data on the home ownership rates grouped by age (https://www.prb.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/a-02132020-ar...) but the data ends in 2017. The oldest of Gen-Z would only be 20 years old at the time this data ends. When we look at the Economist's wrote:

> Bolstered by high incomes, American Zoomers’ home-ownership rates are higher than millennials’ at the same age (even if they are lower than previous generations’).

A chart of home ownership rates that end in 2017 could not possibly refute this claim given that Gen-Z would be too young to buy homes around the time that the data's source ends. The home ownership rate among under-35s increased from 34% in 2017 to 39% in 2023 (https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/07/younger-house...), so when Gen-Z started to enter their earliest feasible home-buying years the ownership rate was in a period of recovery. The Economist's claims seem to bear out.

The rest of the piece goes off on tangents largely unrelated to the financial outcomes related to Gen-Z relative to previous generations. For instance, it cites a pew survey on the percentage of young adults that support their parents. But it does not compare that against earlier decades, so there's no evidence in any change in rate over time. In fact the bulk of the piece shares data that aren't relevant. E.g. how does the racial breakdown of the subprime mortgages relate to incomes by age and birth year?

People really hate AI because it's marketed in the worst ways possible for the general public.

CEOs love to get up and say "Hey, we are firing 1000 people because of this awesome AI" [1]

For people that like computers, AI is jacking up the price of electronics with CEOs saying things like "We don't even have a place to plug these cards in, we are just buying up whatever we can get" [2]. They are further causing memory manufacturers to simply discontinue consumer products [3]

Then there are the AI CEOs that love advertising the fact that their companies will eliminate huge swaths of the job market and make good paying jobs obsolete. [4]

Of course when the general public even starts to ask "ok, what is this and why should I care" a lot of the answers are "You just should, you'll be left behind" without actual explanations for why or how. [5]

And of course lets not forget that practically cartoonish villiny of the data centers being ramrodded through by bribing local politicians with false claims of tax benefits. All while being powered by massive amounts of fossil fuel burners. [6]

Yeah, people hate AI, because it seems be a bunch of out of touch CEOs that only talk to each other in glee about how awesome it will be to have no workers and how great it is that they have enough money and political influence to do anything they like regardless public sentiment.

It's a product that wasn't sold to the average joe, it was sold to the uber wealthy. It very clearly shows.

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-for-the-future/

[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

[3] https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-deta...

[4] https://fortune.com/article/why-microsoft-ai-chief-mustafa-s...

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hTJUl4--8c

[6] https://www.sltrib.com/news/2026/05/04/utah-data-center-fina...