Silicon Valley is trying to make sense of the growing backlash against artificial intelligence, but so far, it’s not going that well. The inconvenient truth is that a significant portion of the world is not optimistic about the technology they’re building. But recent attempts to diagnose the root of the problem by CEOs like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei indicate they don’t understand what’s actually driving society’s disdain for AI.

The rest of popular culture, meanwhile, is finding ways to capitalize on AI hate. Just look at this new commercial for Liquid Death and Garage Beer. The two beverage brands teamed up with former Philadelphia Eagles football player and Taylor Swift brother-in-law Jason Kelce, who invited people to pee in bottles and send them to AI data centers. In an interview with Marketing Dive, Liquid Death’s creative lead said the data center backlash was “literally the one thing that unites all Americans right now.”

More than half of Americans under 30 say they are more concerned than excited about AI, a figure that’s grown 24 percent in the last five years, according to a Pew Research Center survey published earlier this week. More than 70 percent of people polled in all age groups say they believe AI will lead to fewer jobs.

But other recent polling data shows that people have broader anxieties about the technology that go far beyond jobs and the data center boom. Americans also think AI will harm young people’s ability to form meaningful relationships , that tech companies should be required to compensate creators whose works were used to train models, and that AI could harm the critical thinking skills of students.

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