Why Do People Hate AI but Can't Stop Using It?

Public opinion of artificial intelligence is hard to pin down, but one pattern is hard to miss: many people distrust the technology, and many of those same people keep using it. That tension framed a summer interview with the chief executive of Springboards, a startup developing a large language model built to produce a wider range of responses than the mainstream models it competes with.

The company's pitch centers on variety. Chatbots often settle into similar, safe-sounding answers, and Springboards wants its model to offer more distinct options when someone asks a question. The CEO opened the conversation with a line that stayed with the reporter: "We often say that we're a self-loathing AI." It landed as a joke, but it also acknowledged something real. The company is building a product while openly sharing the doubts many people have about the industry it belongs to.

Those doubts are not hard to find. Critics raise concerns about job losses, misinformation, copyright, and the concentration of power among a small number of large companies. At the same time, chatbots and AI tools have spread quickly, and many people now rely on them for drafting, searching, and writing code. The gap between how people talk about AI and how they actually use it is the puzzle at the center of the story.

For a startup, that gap cuts both ways. Public distrust can make it harder to win customers and investors, but it also leaves room for a product that promises something different from the default. Whether a more varied model can win over skeptics is an open question. At least in that conversation, the company's answer to the criticism was less about messaging and more about how the product itself behaves.