The AI backlash is getting real

Merriam-Webster’s word of the year is “slop,” a term that has come to define a growing resistance to all things artificial intelligence, including massive, energy-hungry data centers, simulated actors and television commercials, and an endless stream of online fakery.

Days after taking office, President Trump issued an executive order aimed at ensuring the United States, and not China, becomes “the global leader in AI.”

His initiative faces an increasing number of Americans who fear AI technology will destroy jobs and degrade society, not to mention drive up energy costs and drain water resources.

“I’m not buying the narrative that they are trying to sell us on this,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said at a recent roundtable on AI development.

The public is souring on some of the promises of artificial intelligence.

Two weeks before Christmas, McDonald’s pulled down a 45-second, AI-generated holiday ad that viewers deemed cringey. It featured fake people amid fake winter scenery bemoaning AI-generated Christmas chaos and finding solace in a fake McDonald’s restaurant lobby serving digitally created customers.

The takeover of AI-generated material has advanced so quickly that Merriam-Webster’s human editors have picked “slop” as their word of the year, defining it as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.”

AI-generated videos have saturated social media, leaving scrollers wondering whether anything they view is real. AI-generated songs are emerging, including all-AI bands that have generated hits.

“AI music is now clearly part of the mainstream conversation in music, and it is competing in the marketplace with human-made works,” the music media site Billboard reported this month.

Zebracat, an AI software company, estimates that AI-generated videos now account for 40% of video content on social media platforms. The company said more than half of consumers “prefer” AI-generated content over generic videos, but national surveys show the public has a mixed view of the technology and most distrust it.

A Pew Research Center survey found that many U.S. adults have soured on AI and believe it will worsen people’s ability to form meaningful relationships. More than half of adults, the survey found, are concerned about the growing presence of AI in daily life. A poll released in November by Gallup found that 77% of adults do not trust businesses to use AI “responsibly.”

The rise in AI chatbots has increased risks to children. Chatbot platform Character.AI recently banned anyone younger than 18 from conversing with its chatbots. It followed a lawsuit filed by Texas mother Mandi Furniss, who said the platform’s AI characters used sexualized and violent language that led her autistic son to harm himself.

Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, expressed his disdain for the technology at an AI roundtable event he recently hosted at Florida Atlantic University.

“All that stuff is mindless slop, and if that floats your boat, OK. But don’t tell me that is what we need to beat China — fake songs, fake videos and all these other things.”

The pushback is happening as Mr. Trump takes steps he believes will ensure the U.S. wins the AI race against China.

AI is not just churning out slop.

Artificial intelligence has made significant advances in science and medicine, improved government efficiency and aided U.S. intelligence agencies in analyzing threats. It has accelerated research into diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, according to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. Advances in AI help everyday Americans more than most realize, automating tasks such as smart home management and providing driving directions.

Mr. Trump said in December that AI companies, including Meta, Amazon, Google and Microsoft, are poised to invest trillions of dollars in the U.S. but could be hindered by the patchwork of state laws that might block the industry.

The president directed his administration this month to block states from regulating artificial intelligence and to create federal guidelines that would dictate the nation’s artificial intelligence policy.

Mr. Trump’s AI litigation task force will challenge state AI laws and preempt them with Mr. Trump’s federal policy. Under the order, Attorney General Pam Bondi will establish the task force, whose sole responsibility will be to challenge state AI laws in court.

“I spoke to all of the big companies. This will not be successful unless they have one source of approval — or disapproval too. They can’t go to 50 different sources,” Mr. Trump said. “We have to be unified. China is unified because they have one vote. It’s President Xi [Jinping].”

Mr. DeSantis, meanwhile, is proposing the opposite: an AI Bill of Rights to protect his state from the harms of artificial intelligence and the costs of giant data centers.

He is not the only government leader resisting AI.

State and local officials are moving to slow down or stop AI’s rapid advances, and communities are blocking the construction of massive AI data centers in their backyards.

Counties in more than one dozen states are taking steps to block “hyperscale” data centers because of concerns about noise, energy costs and massive water requirements.

Warrenton, Virginia, residents voted out members of the Town Council who approved a 220,000-square-foot Amazon data center on the edge of town. The newly elected Town Council voted unanimously in July to amend the town’s zoning ordinance to ban future data centers.

Several counties in Indiana have implemented moratoriums on hyperscale data centers like the one planned in Warrenton.

Existing data centers are already driving up energy bills and are projected to consume nearly 12% of all U.S. electricity by 2030.

Data centers also require enormous amounts of water, up to 300,000 gallons daily, to cool their processors.

Community anger over the data centers is pressuring some Republican lawmakers to question or even buck Mr. Trump’s efforts to rapidly advance AI in the United States.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican who is leaving Congress this week, warned that Mr. Trump’s executive order goes too far in clearing the path for AI to advance in the United States.

“Competing with China does not mean becoming like China by threatening state rights, replacing human jobs on a mass scale, creating mass poverty, and creating potentially devastating effects on our environment and critical water supply,” she said. “This needs a careful and wise approach. The AI executive order takes the opposite.”

A November report by the McKinsey Global Institute said existing AI technology could potentially replace 57% of work hours. The report said it is not forecasting job losses but rather a partnership between humans and AI.

“As it unfolds, some roles will shrink, others grow or shift, while new ones emerge — with work increasingly centered on collaboration between humans and intelligent machines,” the report predicted.

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers continue to debate the impact of AI on the nation. Some are demanding legislative action to slow down its advance.

At a recent House Homeland Security Committee hearing on AI, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York Democrat, criticized Mr. Trump’s executive order for attempting to circumvent state authority to regulate the technology.

“This is happening as AI chatbots are causing children to take their own lives, as AI data centers are skyrocketing electricity costs and polluting local communities,” she said. “And as an overwhelming majority of Americans worry that AI will take their jobs and leave them permanently unemployed.”