AI is less popular than ICE, yet ChatGPT just hit 1 billion users

Over the summer, the CEO of Springboards, a startup building an LLM designed to produce more varied responses than mainstream rivals, opened a call with a confession that has stuck with the journalist who wrote the story: "We often say that we're a self-loathing AI company. We don't know if we really like what we're doing." He's not alone. Around the world, the relationship with AI has become a love-hate affair.

The numbers back up both sides of the paradox. In a March NBC poll, AI was less popular than ICE. Yet ChatGPT hit a billion monthly users in May, according to Sensor Tower, and Google DeepMind's Gemini logged 950 million in July. Pew Research data shows half of US adults now use a chatbot, more than double the share in 2023, and one in four use one daily. Across 38 OECD countries, more than a third of adults said they used generative AI in the last three months.

The dislike is real and measurable. Pew found more US adults expect AI to have a negative impact on them personally and on society than positive. The pessimism is strongest among the young. A Stanford report found more than half of people worldwide say AI makes them nervous. A May Gallup poll found 71% of US adults would oppose a new AI data center in their area, compared to 53% who would oppose a new nuclear power plant. That is not lukewarm ambivalence; it is active resistance to the physical infrastructure of AI.

So what is going on? The author of the piece argues the two groups are not separate. The numbers don't add up unless the Venn diagram is nearly a circle. One theory is that more usage breeds more negativity. There's a correlation: the Global North, where adoption is highest, skews pessimistic, while the Global South, where adoption is lower, is more optimistic. But the more compelling explanation is that people don't hate the technology itself; they hate the relentless push from the companies behind it. The same companies are warning the public to brace for the biggest social and economic upheaval in generations.

We've seen this play out before. Over the last 20 years, billions flocked to Facebook and Twitter despite mounting techlash against the companies running those services. Google search similarly. With social media, quitting meant losing your content and connections, so users either sucked it up or started over. With AI, there is still an opening for people to have some sway without paying that steep price. There's more political appetite for regulation this time. All 50 US states have either passed or proposed laws governing AI development and deployment, creating a patchwork of more than 2,100 bills across the country, a tenfold increase in three years.

Meanwhile, top-class open-source alternatives to Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic are already on the market, giving consumers more choice and creating market pressure. The author admits she doesn't want to be naive: trillion-dollar companies are hard to move. But the point is that what comes next is not as inevitable as the big players often imply. The Springboards CEO said there is no walking back from LLMs, but you can still make them do something different.

For executives in any industry, the strategic stakes are clear. The public is not rejecting the utility of AI; they are rejecting the way it is being sold and imposed. That creates a differentiated position for companies that are clear about what AI can and can't do, that avoid hype, and that don't posture as if the technology is about to take over the world. The self-loathing is a signal, not a bug. Companies that respond with transparency and restraint may earn trust in a market where trust is scarce.

The story ends with a hope: "Here's hoping we see a lot more of something different: AI that's clear about what it can and can't do and, crucially, that's not posturing as if it's about to take over the world." For leaders, that's not just a hope; it's a playbook. The companies that win the next phase of AI won't be the loudest boosters. They'll be the ones that listen to the skeptics and build technology people actually want to live with.