AI backlash forcing companies to pull unpopular features

Frustration with generative AI has reached a breaking point for many Americans. When Meredith Broussard, a data journalism professor at New York University and author of Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World, was asked about the trend, she summarized it bluntly: "The AI revolution has happened, and everybody hates it." A recent Gallup poll backs this up, showing that as Americans have grown more familiar with generative AI, their attitudes toward it have turned increasingly negative. The discontent is strongest among young people aged 18 to 29, where almost half view generative AI as doing more harm than good.

The core grievance is consent. Users woke up to find that their online data had been scraped en masse to train AI models, that Instagram had enabled deepfake creation without permission, and that Google was inserting AI-generated answers atop search results they never asked for. As Broussard told WIRED, "Consent is really important. We can connect that to the way that women, queer people, people of color, and minorities get exploited and abused online. Tech companies have never really been sensitive to issues of consent." The sense of powerlessness—that the AI revolution is something happening to people rather than something they chose—has fueled resentment.

Public backlash is proving effective at forcing reversals. LinkedIn introduced a "seems like AI slop" button to flag AI-generated content, Snapchat announced that fully AI-generated videos would no longer appear in its discovery feed, and Substack added AI detection tools to monitor writers. Most strikingly, Google rolled back its new AI image-editing feature for Google Earth almost immediately after launch, following reporting by 404 Media. Meta disabled Instagram's deepfake tool after just three days of viral criticism, with millions of users sharing videos condemning the feature. As Nick Seaver, an associate professor of anthropology at Tufts University, observed, "They just roll them out and see what sticks, because nobody really knows what this is for." That approach is backfiring.

The backlash extends into marketing and infrastructure. Major brands—McDonald's and Coca-Cola among them—faced public anger for incorporating AI visuals into advertisements, and even local shops drew criticism for using AI-generated posters to promote events. Beyond that, a new front has opened: protests against data centers. Emily Bender, coauthor of The AI Con, notes that data centers are critical focal points of environmental and economic damage. Americans across the political spectrum have recently begun uniting in opposition to new data center construction, suggesting that infrastructure and environmental concerns may prove harder for the industry to overcome than backlash against individual features.