[Bloomberg] AI is dividing friends, families, and coworkers
As artificial intelligence becomes ingrained in daily life, disagreements over the technology are increasingly becoming disagreements over values.
Vanessa Walilko wants nothing to do with artificial intelligence. She worries about what AI companies are doing with people’s data, the industry’s impact on the environment, and how the tools are eroding human creativity and critical thinking. Because of all this, she says she “gets really, really mad at people who use it.”Those beliefs have put the 43-year-old jewelry designer, who lives in Evanston, Illinois, at odds with friends and family. Recently, Walilko, who also works in PR, found herself arguing with a friend who kept sending her AI-generated videos of animals. “They showed baby cows fitting into the two palms of someone’s hands, and my friend kept insisting they were real,” she says. “It was infuriating.” Then her cousin sent her a photograph of Walilko’s dead grandparents, animated using AI. “I was so disgusted by her marionetting their corpses,” she says. “She told me she’d ‘alived them’ again.” Walilko says the episode has “absolutely” strained their relationship. “I’m constantly scared of what she might use AI for next.”
AI has gone from the margins to the mainstream in an astonishingly short time. About half of US adults use AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot, with 1 in 4 using them daily, according to Pew Research Center data published in June.
But the technology’s rapid adoption has been accompanied by growing unease. More than half of global respondents to a 2025 Stanford University study agreed with the statement that “products and services using artificial intelligence make me nervous,” up from 39% in 2022. Sentiment also varies sharply by region. Just 38% of US respondents said products and services using AI make them excited, compared with 84% in China, 80% in Indonesia, 37% in Great Britain and 34% in Sweden. In much of the West, in particular, that unease has given rise to a growing culture of refusal from people like Walilko.
Full article on Bloomberg
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Comments
Everything is so divisive now. Something is wrong with our society
Agreed! There are billions of people on the planet now. Different people like different things. We need to embrace those differences more, they add so much flavour to life.
It's definitely a weird trend. I've no problem with people having opinions but when people become so polarised that they consider you an enemy if you disagree or simply just aren't an activist like they are, i see it as a sign of derangement. Kinda reminds me of the vegans we had a few years ago 🤭 Going to restaurants and screaming at staff for cooking meat. You don't see that much anymore but looks like those type of people have moved to a new thing to have a meltdown about.
I think it’s here to stay. At least I hope so, I use my Gemini Premium account everyday.