06/08/2026
Only 9 percent of US adults still think AI does more good than harm, according to a joint poll from Bentley University and Gallup. The share who say it does more harm than good rose from 31 percent in 2025 to 39 percent this year, even as the number of people calling themselves "somewhat or extremely knowledgeable" about the tech hit 70 percent, up 6 points since 2024.
The unease isn't just American. A 2025 Stanford study found more than half of global respondents agreed that "products and services using artificial intelligence make me nervous," up from 39 percent in 2022. Only 38 percent of US respondents said AI excites them, compared with 84 percent in China and 80 percent in Indonesia.
Derek Leben, a professor of ethics at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business, told Bloomberg the shift is turning personal. "The most obvious social effect is suspicion," he said, pointing to a workplace phenomenon now called "AI suspicion," where employees suspect coworkers of secretly using the tech to generate their work.
That friction is being amplified from the top: companies including Accenture and Starbucks now tie promotions or bonuses to AI usage, and one New York retail worker told Bloomberg her employer suspends the staff discount for workers who skip AI training.
The rifts are landing harder at home. Vanessa Walilko, a 43-year-old jewelry designer in Evanston, Illinois, told Bloomberg her cousin used AI to animate a photo of Walilko's dead grandparents and said she'd "alived them" again.
"I was so disgusted by her marionetting their corpses," Walilko said. Carla Milan, a 37-year-old public health professional in New York, put the broader frustration this way: "I hear people champion AI and I'm like, 'sure, why don't we all participate in our collective downfall?'"
It's reshaping who people want to be with, too. In a Hily survey of 3,500 young Americans, 64 percent of Gen Z and 56 percent of millennials said they wouldn't date someone who relies on AI for everyday decisions, and roughly the same share said they'd find a partner who never uses AI for personal decisions "extremely attractive."
