It’s becoming obvious at how badly disconnected the U.S. tech industry has become from the rest of us. Day after day we are being fed claims of how amazing AI is and how it will solve many of the world’s problems. The press parrots the PR releases from the AI companies about how AI is about to accelerate medical research and even cure cancer, and make dvances in most every other area they can think of. But an increasing number of us are not buying their story. The world is finally waking up to the fact that the AI Revolution feels less like progress and more like a heist. After three years of promise AI has given us improved search capabilities using natural language, an ability to retrieve data and present it in novel ways, some impressive tools to create fake images, an ability to write code – although of questionable quality- and not much else for the consumer.
As Gary Marcus, an AI expert and prolific skeptic of current AI tech, recently noted, we are witnessing the birth of a massive, grassroots backlash that is rapidly transforming into a major political firestorm. Marcus predicted a year ago that anti-AI sentiment would be a major factor in the 2028 Presidential election, and looking at the current landscape, he might have been conservative in that estimate.
The signs of resistance are everywhere. Marcus points to a startling statistic: 44 percent of Gen Z workers have admitted to actively sabotaging their company’s AI strategy. When you see your hard earned career competing with “slop”—unreliable, hallucination-prone AI output—the natural response is to fight back.
We’re seeing AI-powered high school programs being scrapped after parental protests. We’re seeing the rise of the “QuitGPT” movement signaling the first true social-political consumer strike against the tech giants. People are exhausted by a technology that was promised to be our expert assistant, but has instead become a source of disinformation, nonconsensual deepfakes, and a flood of low-quality content, much of it fake, that is drowning the useful internet. The growth of consumer usage of ChatGPT has even slowed significantly.
The core of the problem isn’t just the technology—it’s the hubris of the tech moguls behind it. They talk about the benefits to civilization while running roughshod over any semblence of safety, reasonable regulations, and addressing societal problems – because they might impact shareholder value.
These tech leaders want all the rewards of what they call god-like intelligence while taking zero responsibility for the wreckage it leaves behind. They have fought against common-sense regulation that would protect artists, writers, and workers. They preach about AI for humanity while simultaneously cooperating with agencies like ICE to build high-tech surveillance nets. They demand more environment-damaging data centers that strain our power grids and risk a recession, all to chase high valuations. They are simply tone deaf or in some cases, belief democracy is an obstacle they can overcome.
Marcus hits the nail on the head: the goal of these moguls is to privatize all the gains while socializing all the costs.
They want the multi-trillion-dollar valuations, but they want us to deal with the poisoned information ecosystem, the decimated job market, and the privacy violations. They treat the predictable downsides—increased phishing, cybercrime, and economic disparity—as edge cases rather than the fundamental failures they are.
In the paradigm of product development as I’ve experienced it for decades, you identified a human pain point and built a solution. Today, we have a solution (Generative AI) and a bunch of billionaires desperately trying to force-fit it into every corner of our lives, whether we want it or not.
Can we honestly say AI has made society better than it was four years ago? We are seeing education undermined, codebases infested with buggy AI-generated shortcuts, and a world increasingly unable to distinguish truth from a lie.
I’ve always believed that technology, at its best, is a tool that empowers the individual. But the current AI trajectory is the opposite. It empowers the person who already has the most data and the most compute power, while leaving the individual user to sift through the slop.
Until the industry stops marveling at itself and starts looking at the actual humans on the other side of the screen, the backlash will only grow. The public is tired of being the “training data” for a future they never asked for. If the tech moguls don’t start listening soon, they’re going to find that no amount of AI can solve the problem of a world that has simply had enough.
