Obviously, I’ve been pro-AI on this blog, actively trying to understand and figure out how it’s affecting UX design and how to use it for leverage instead of being replaced by it. In Silicon Valley and tech companies everywhere, including BuildOps, we’re racing to incorporate AI into our daily work to increase velocity, and adding it to our products to stay relevant.
Nilay Patel, in a Decoder monologue, lays out the polling that should rattle anyone shipping AI products:
There’s that NBC News poll showing AI with worse favorables than ICE, and only a little bit above the war in Iran and Democrats generally. That’s what the nearly two-thirds of respondents saying they’d used ChatGPT or Copilot in the last month. Quinnipiac just found that over half of Americans think AI will do more harm than good. Well, more than 80% of people were either very concerned or somewhat concerned about the technology. Only 35% of people were excited about it. And poll after poll shows that Gen Z uses AI the most and has the most negative feelings about it. A recent Gallup poll found that only 18% of Gen Z was hopeful about AI, down from an already bad 27% last year. At the same time, anger is growing. 31% of those Gen Z respondents said they feel angry about AI, up from 22% last year.
The killer detail is buried halfway through. The Gen Z curve is striking: heaviest users, and yet the fastest to sour. Anger is up nine points in a year. These aren’t non-users reacting to coverage. They’re the daily customers, and the answer is no. Sam Altman has called this AI’s marketing problem. The polling rebuts him: public exposure has grown, public favor has not.
Patel’s title line:
Regular people don’t see the opportunity to write code as an opportunity at all. The people do not yearn for automation. I’m a full-on smart home sicko. The lights and shades and climate controls of this house are automated in dozens of ways, but huge companies like Apple and Google and Amazon have struggled for over a decade now to make regular care about smart home automation, and they just don’t. AI isn’t gonna fix that.
Patel grounds the title in his own smart-home enthusiasm, and the comparison clicks because the failure pattern is identical: decade-plus of effort, billions in marketing, working products, and persistent indifference. Apple, Google, and Amazon ran that experiment. AI will not crack a problem that smart-home automation hasn’t.
John Gruber connects the same dissonance to the Mos Eisley cantina from Star Wars. Luke walks in with C-3PO and R2-D2. The bartender, Wuher, barks: “We don’t serve their kind here. Your droids. They’ll have to wait outside.” Gruber:
As a kid, I didn’t get it. Why would you not want droids? Star Wars made robots seem so real, so fun. Why would you ban them? That scene has stuck with me for my entire life. I didn’t get why, but I understood what it meant about that galaxy: the underclass deeply resented droids.
Gruber leaves the question open. He says he didn’t get why the droids weren’t welcome. The cantina’s animosity wasn’t arbitrary. Mos Eisley sits in the Outer Rim, where droid armies killed millions and occupied worlds during the Clone Wars. After the war, droids became a subjugated worker class across the galaxy, and Outer Rim spots like Mos Eisley held the line hardest. Wuher’s verdict comes from experience.
That’s the parallel for AI. Public distrust is earned. People have lived with AI overviews getting facts wrong and feeds drowning in slop, while every product asks them to bend a little more toward the database. Patel:
And so the tech industry is rushing forward to put AI everywhere at enormous cost, energy, emissions, manufacturing capacity, the ability to buy RAM locked into the narrow framework of software brain, without realizing they are also asking people to be fundamentally less human. And then they’re sitting around, wondering why everyone hates them. I don’t think a couple haircuts are gonna fix it.
As an industry, we need to continue to show the value of AI by being truly useful, not just market it.
