Gen Z college graduates are booing and walking out on commencement speakers who work for tech companies developing artificial intelligence. Communities all across the country are fighting against the development of data centers to handle all the computing power needed to run AI programs. AI skepticism is so rampant that it’s even inspired a rare moment of bipartisanship, as politicians from both sides of the aisle have called to rein in AI companies and tax them upwards of 50 percent.
But it’s unclear whether these PR challenges will negatively affect AI’s effectiveness and growth as an advertising and commerce platform. Recent history suggests the controversies will have little impact — social media and search platforms suffered from barrages of criticism around privacy, safety and building their platforms off of other people’s content, only to become the largest advertising platforms in history. AI seems to be on the same trajectory, with historically fast adoption rates and huge gains in advertising revenue, despite growing suspicion among the very people who continue to use it.
AI, the world-changing superintelligence that can do everything from discover cures for cancer to write grammatically pristine emails, has a branding problem in the U.S., as concerns about its effects on jobs, the environment and the growing divide between the rich and poor outweigh excitement about any societal good it may elicit.
“Over the course of the last year or two, AI has seen a stunning drop in terms of brand equity,” says Trevor Sumner, CEO of i-Genie.ai, citing consumers’ concerns about job losses, the environmental impact of energy-intensive AI data centers and the growing wealth disparity between Silicon Valley elite making AI and the ordinary folk using their products. Sumner would know; i-Genie.ai collects consumer sentiment signals from social media and ecommerce sites and uses AI to automatically generate brand and product equity analyses that have historically taken months to produce.
A recent poll by the Pew Research Center found Americans are deeply wary of any potential benefits from AI technology. Only 16 percent of respondents believe AI will have a positive effect on society, and just less than a third (31 percent) believe AI will have a negative impact on them personally.
Most of this is due to concerns about massive job losses, a doomsday scenario many AI executives have themselves touted, and potentially negative effects on the environment because of the massive energy needs AI requires.
“I didn't think a year ago that AI would become a major mid-term election issue,” says David Berkowitz, founder of industry trade group the AI Marketers Guild, referring to efforts to nationalize AI companies and taxing them at a 50 percent rate, and voters across the country opposing the construction of data centers in their districts.
And yet all the ill will has had seemingly little effect on people’s actual usage of AI platforms. Consumers are adopting generative AI at a faster rate than they did the personal computer and the internet, and OpenAI says its popular chatbot ChatGPT will be a $100 billion advertising business in just four years.
A lot of the anti-AI backlash is part of people’s frustrations with their inability to keep social media platforms in check, and the negative effects they have had on people’s mental health and children’s learning capabilities, Berkowitz says. There were countless attempts to boycott Facebook and pressure brands to stop advertising to the company, and it continued to grow unabated.
Independent media analyst Andrew Lipsman isn’t so sure, however, that AI will skate by the way Meta has. The hype around AI is enormous, Lipsman argues, and it’s increasingly difficult for AI companies to live up to their lofty claims about disrupting every facet of life and business, and to justify their astronomical operations costs. OpenAI recently missed its targets for new users and revenue. Over one six-week period in February and March, ChatGPT usage declined.
“There will be a certain degree of hypocrisy from users who say they dislike AI but continue to use it anyway. This is similar to what happens with Meta today, which isn't very popular but still dominates online engagement,” Lipsman tells The Outcome.
“On the other hand, the negative sentiment has a strong gravitational effect on usage making it much more difficult for these companies to reach escape velocity. The exponential growth curve has already tipped over and growth from this point forward will likely be more gradual. That simply doesn't bode well for accelerated monetization.”
If AI companies want to win consumers over, they need to have honest conversations about the potential benefits of the technology — and its associated costs.
“Healthcare seems like the one net positive that could come from AI,” Berkowitz adds. ““It’s surprising that more AI companies are not leaning into that.”
