The A.I. Backlash Could Get Very Ugly

[RAMROD 117,252]

Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders don’t agree on much. But both think that AI is a disaster for the working class. The Vermont senator recently wrote that “AI oligarchs do not want to just replace specific jobs. They want to replace workers.” Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, made similar comments last week: Silicon Valley does “not care about the little guy,” he said in a podcast episode titled “Stopping the AI Oligarchs From Stealing Humanity.” This emergent “Bernie-to-Bannon” coalition points to the growing bipartisan anxiety over AI. In polls, the United States ranks among the countries most concerned about AI. America is both the world’s foremost developer of AI and its chief hater.

Recently, Maine passed the country’s first statewide data-center moratorium (though the bill was vetoed by the governor). Nationally, a record number of proposed projects were canceled in the first quarter of this year following local pushback. Meanwhile, in extreme cases, concerns about AI appear to be tipping into violence. In April, someone shot 13 rounds at an Indianapolis councilman’s house and left a note under his doormat: “NO DATA CENTERS,” it read. Days later, a man threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s home before heading to OpenAI’s headquarters, where he allegedly threatened to burn down the building and kill anyone inside. (The man has since pleaded not guilty to several charges, including attempted murder.) Social-media posts applauding the attack racked up thousands of likes: “I hope that Molotov is okay!” wrote one commenter.

All of this may be only the start. The AI industry has spent recent years warning of a jobless future. So far, narratives about labor displacement have been largely speculation. While a smattering of tech executives have attributed job cuts to AI, many analysts have accused these CEOs of “AI-washing”—essentially, using the technology as a scapegoat for roles they would have eliminated regardless. If anything, AI has mostly been a financial boon for the country, buoying the stock market and driving growth. But that could all change, of course. Imagine the uproar if jobs across the economy truly start disappearing en masse.

In a worst-case scenario, the situation could get ugly. With its potential for sweeping social and economic transformation, “AI generates the structural conditions historically associated with the onset of political violence,” Yannick Veilleux-Lepage, a researcher who studies technology and terrorism, wrote in April. Already, as many as a quarter of Americans seem accepting of violence as a tool for achieving political change. And in recent months, there has been a rise in “direct threats” against individuals, policy makers, and corporations involved with AI, according to the Soufan Center, a nonpartisan research group. The most common threats online involve “physical sabotage of proposed or operational data centers.” Local officials are in an especially vulnerable position: “Where national figures are unreachable, local policymakers who approved the data center become the proxies for the same structural anger,” Veilleux-Lepage wrote. After the shooting in Indianapolis, the council introduced a measure that would allow officials to keep their addresses private.

Silicon Valley is waking up to the resentment. Tech insiders have spent recent weeks exchanging tactics on X with advice on how to better sell AI. Perhaps, if data centers were beautiful, people would like them more? In particular, there’s been an effort to change the narrative around AI job loss. The venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz recently published an essay declaring the “job apocalypse” to be a baseless fantasy. “The macro story is not a jobless future, where we retire fat and complacent to our Netflix-scooters,” it read. In 2023, after ChatGPT came out, Altman told my colleague Ross Andersen that “jobs are definitely going to go away, full stop.” Now he appears to have changed his tune: “Jobs doomerism is likely long-term wrong,” Altman wrote earlier this month.

But most of the country already feels as if the economy is rigged to advantage the wealthy. One poll found that when sorted by household income, the group of Americans most optimistic about AI in their daily lives are those making more than $200,000. The near future of AI seems likely to further entrench such dynamics: OpenAI and Anthropic are both nearing trillion-dollar valuations, consolidating even more money and power among a select few. “Disruption has winners and losers,” Nathaniel Persily, a Stanford law professor and AI expert, told me. “For many Americans, they’re not convinced they’re going to be the winners, and they base that conclusion on the history of technology over the last 20 years.” If the tech industry truly believes that a simple change in messaging will quell the backlash, then they are misunderstanding the problem entirely.

 

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/05/ai-backlash-data-centers-political-violence/687151/?taid=6a067e2d2096e10001ccfa32

[River 127,736]

2 minutes ago, RAMROD said:

Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist

[shape of a rvfzme 1,777]

I don't want to believe it

[weed 79,034]

I'll support AI when it permanently deletes MAGA

[gagzus 23,419]

AI is good for narrowing down searchable information but everything else it’s simply not helpful or good.

[Junko Enoshima 4,613]

We were better without Generative AI THANK YOU.

Edited May 15 by Junko Enoshima

[PartySick 172,973]

24 minutes ago, gagzus said:

AI is good for narrowing down searchable information but everything else it’s simply not helpful or good.

I've enjoyed using Gemini as a replacement for Google search tbh. It helps that it almost always links to a source

That's what it's good for. Knowledge accessibility and maybe as a little "intelligent" pocket companion to help you organize your own hobbies or work.

I'm glad there's bipartisan, wide spread backlash against AI in general though. It's being used against artists and against the working class. Not to mention these data centers are unsustainably resource intensive, incredibly unpopular, and prime arson targets for the right people who are into that sort of vigilante justice.

[ActualPatient 2,512]

Oh i thought this would be backlash against that Apple Music candle

[Economy 52,895]

1 hour ago, gagzus said:

AI is good for narrowing down searchable information but everything else it’s simply not helpful or good.

- Medical research

- Geological surveying for resource extraction (not just lower costs, less environmental damage too by reducing misses that strip or disturb land for nothing)

- more productivity

 

Tbh my issue isnt with AI in of itself, its the fact that we have no policies in place whatsoever to ensure that economic gains from this can actually be distributed other wise it would be a great thing overall

 

(Excluding its use in art or anything that should have human emotion)

[gagzus 23,419]

1 hour ago, PartySick said:

I've enjoyed using Gemini as a replacement for Google search tbh. It helps that it almost always links to a source

That's what it's good for. Knowledge accessibility and maybe as a little "intelligent" pocket companion to help you organize your own hobbies or work.

I'm glad there's bipartisan, wide spread backlash against AI in general though. It's being used against artists and against the working class. Not to mention these data centers are unsustainably resource intensive, incredibly unpopular, and prime arson targets for the right people who are into that sort of vigilante justice.

Yeah I can confirm this. I think I mentioned it on here before, but I have done Graphic Design as a side gig for years and work for a company where I get to pick my own hours every week. 

A few weeks ago an entire company that hired us, decide they no longer needed us because the £3k they were spending on us to do all their content, marketing, web design etc… could be saved by AI making it for them. So just like that I lost money to something that will be a mix of stolen identity from other Graphic Designers. I also have been doing writing and start focusing more on that to become a culture writer, and even that is rife with AI articles all over the internet. 

That’s why in another thread, I got so peeved when someone said that “AI makes anyone an artist” when it makes you a thief. 

Gaining knowledge to curated and researched information that’s public domain is fine. But plagiarism is another thing. 

Also because AI is so common now, it’s learned how to emulate publication level writing. So writers are having to either dumb down or keep exact records of when they wrote things, because, companies are using AI detection software that gives you a % CHANCE it could be AI but they take it as gospel. And now AI can write quite human like, it’s becoming increasingly annoying to do anything creatively.

Edited May 16 by gagzus

[gagzus 23,419]

43 minutes ago, Economy said:

- Medical research

- Geological surveying for resource extraction (not just lower costs, less environmental damage too by reducing misses that strip or disturb land for nothing)

- more productivity

 

Tbh my issue isnt with AI in of itself, its the fact that we have no policies in place whatsoever to ensure that economic gains from this can actually be distributed other wise it would be a great thing overall

 

(Excluding its use in art or anything that should have human emotion)

I agree that we need policies in place. We should have an outright ban on generative AI and have it be used as a research tool only. 

They’ve banned deepfakes here in the UK, which is AI, but won’t ban generative AI because it’s apparently “too wide spread to control now”. Which makes my blood boil.

[gumzy3000 7,901]

If people are going to lose there jobs to AI then how will these companies make money when no one even has money to buy their stuff? Although we could be reaching a point in this overpopulated Earth where there will always be a consumer regardless of how many people are in poverty. Kind of scary to think about. 

Anyways, I think it’s time we all fight for universal income. As a kid I thought the future would have robots doing the work so humans can enjoy their life. We have AI accelerating productivity so it only makes sense for universal income to become a reality as there simply won’t be enough jobs. 

[PartySick 172,973]

30 minutes ago, gagzus said:

Yeah I can confirm this. I think I mentioned it on here before, but I have done Graphic Design as a side gig for years and work for a company where I get to pick my own hours every week. 

A few weeks ago an entire company that hired us, decide they no longer needed us because the £3k they were spending on us to do all their content, marketing, web design etc… could be saved by AI making it for them. So just like that I lost money to something that will be a mix of stolen identity from other Graphic Designers. I also have been doing writing and start focusing more on that to become a culture writer, and even that is rife with AI articles all over the internet. 

That’s why in another thread, I got so peeved when someone said that “AI makes anyone an artist” when it makes you a thief. 

Gaining knowledge to curated and researched information that’s public domain is fine. But plagiarism is another thing. 

Also because AI is so common now, it’s learned how to emulate publication level writing. So writers are having to either dumb down or keep exact records of when they wrote things, because, companies are using AI detection software that gives you a % CHANCE it could be AI but they take it as gospel. And now AI can write quite human like, it’s becoming increasingly annoying to do anything creatively.

Damn, sorry to hear that. Anybody who says generating AI images makes you an "artist" doesn't even have a basic understanding of what art is.

Machines and computers are meant to take care of the monotonous or dangerous tasks so humans could be creative. Instead, the common man is being reduced to wage slaves for billionaires while "creativity" is outsourced to algorithms to "create" barely passable corpo slop.

Just remember, the only people saying this technology is "inevitable" are the people who stand to make billions abusing it and the suckers that are falling for the sales pitch.

There's no reason we can't regulate the hell out of AI other than it might make some assholes take longer to get to trillionaire status.

[Economy 52,895]

2 hours ago, gumzy3000 said:

If people are going to lose there jobs to AI then how will these companies make money when no one even has money to buy their stuff? Although we could be reaching a point in this overpopulated Earth where there will always be a consumer regardless of how many people are in poverty. Kind of scary to think about. 

Anyways, I think it’s time we all fight for universal income. As a kid I thought the future would have robots doing the work so humans can enjoy their life. We have AI accelerating productivity so it only makes sense for universal income to become a reality as there simply won’t be enough jobs. 

In practice this argument never holds. Even as the bottom 60% to 70% income cohorts have been loosing purchasing power, the gains in spending power in the top 10% to 20% have generally conpensated for it thats why even as a large chunck of population keeps feeling like misery is getting worse and worse this economic collapse some claim is always right around the corner never actually happens

 

If we do get an economic collapse soon like 2008/2009 severity it will likely be triggered because of energy crisis and strait of hormuz not because of AI

 

Anyway, i do not personally believe AI will lead to mass unemployment permanently necessairily. Ppl have said simmilar stuff since beggining of industrial revolution everytime some new highly disruptive technology came along that wiped out many jobs but the economy always adjusted to create new jobs to take their place.

 

My bigger concern is inequality and incomes keeping up with cost of living. Over the long term weve managed to keep jobs (with some fluctuation), but the big issue is the jobs paying enough. The job market becoming less fluid (because specific skills are required for each job) is also a problem. Theres jobs that exist unfilled but people dont qualify for them...

[Starmie25 22,616]

I thought this was about CandleGa