The backlash against AI, in 4 charts

As tech companies pour billions into AI, they face a growing risk: it’s incredibly unpopular. The backlash isn’t surprising. Do we really want technology that eliminates jobs, uses huge amounts of energy and water, erodes our ability to think, and poses a wide range of other risks, from making it easier for the government to surveil citizens to encouraging teen suicide? AI could obviously also be a useful tool—potentially helping develop better drugs and climate solutions, for example—but the haters have a point. And while AI may seem unstoppable, the lack of support means that it’s getting much harder for tech companies to build the new data centers that they desperately want. Americans don’t want to live by data centers In less than a year, opinions about data centers have quickly shifted. In a Heatmap survey last August, 24% of respondents said that they “strongly opposed” a data center being built near where they live. In Heatmap‘s latest survey in May of more than 4,000 voters, that number had jumped to 55%. In the last nine months, strong opposition more than doubled. In a Gallup poll in May, 71% of Americans said they would be opposed to a new AI data center being built in their area, with nearly half of them strongly opposed. (It’s worth noting that in a same survey, only 53% of respondents said that they would oppose a new nuclear power plant in their area.) It’s hard to untangle how much of the data center opposition is tied specifically to the fact that a project powers AI versus more immediate concerns like electric bills; in the Gallup survey, half of opponents cited impacts on resources such as water and energy, and a smaller fraction mentioned their dislike of AI. But it’s also true that many proposed data centers wouldn’t need to exist if not for AI, and voters know that. The fact that AI creates slop and can seem unnecessary isn’t helping. In Virginia, a hotspot for data centers, support for loca