Opinion
Michelle
Goldberg
An
Anti-A.I. Movement Is Coming. Which Party Will Lead It?
Dec. 29,
2025, 7:45 p.m. ET
Michelle
Goldberg
By
Michelle Goldberg
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/opinion/ai-democracy.html
Opinion
Columnist
I
disagree with the anti-immigrant, anti-feminist, bitterly reactionary
right-wing pundit Matt Walsh about basically everything, so I was surprised to
come across a post of his that precisely sums up my view of artificial
intelligence. “We’re sleepwalking into a dystopia that any rational person can
see from miles away,” he wrote in November, adding, “Are we really just going
to lie down and let AI take everything from us?”
A.I.
obviously has beneficial uses, especially medical ones; it may, for example, be
better than humans at identifying localized cancers from medical imagery. But
the list of things it is ruining is long.
A very
partial accounting might start with education, both in the classroom, where
A.I. is increasingly used as a dubious teaching aid, and out of it, where it’s
a plagiarism machine. It would include the economic sustainability and basic
humanity of the arts, as demonstrated by the A.I. country musician who topped a
Billboard chart this year. High on the list would be A.I.’s impact on
employment, which is already bad — including for those who must navigate a
demoralizing A.I.-clogged morass to find jobs — and likely to get worse.
Then
there’s our remaining sense of collective reality, increasingly warped by slop
videos. A.I. data centers are terrible for the environment and are driving up
the cost of electricity. Chatbots appear to be inducing psychosis in some of
their users and even, in extreme cases, encouraging suicide. Privacy is eroding
as A.I. enables both state and corporate surveillance at an astonishing scale.
I could go on.
It is
true that new technologies often inspire dread that looks silly or at least
overwrought in retrospect. But in at least one important way, A.I. is more like
the nuclear bomb than the printing press or the assembly line: Its progenitors
saw its destructive potential from the start but felt desperate to beat
competitors to the punch.
In
“Empire of A.I.,” Karen Hao’s book about Altman’s company, she quotes an email
he wrote to Elon Musk in 2015. “Been thinking a lot about whether it’s possible
to stop humanity from developing A.I.,” wrote Altman. “I think the answer is
almost definitely not.” Given that, he proposed a “Manhattan Project for A.I.,”
so that the dangerous technology would belong to a nonprofit supportive of
aggressive government regulation.
This
year, Altman restructured OpenAI into a for-profit company. Like other tech
barons, he has allied himself with Donald Trump, who recently signed an
executive order attempting to override state A.I. regulations. (Full
disclosure: The New York Times is suing OpenAI for allegedly using its articles
without authorization to train its chatbots.)
Despite
Trump’s embrace of the A.I. industry, attitudes toward the technology don’t
break down along neat partisan lines. Rather, A.I. divides both parties.
Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, is a fierce skeptic; this month he proposed
an A.I. Bill of Rights that would, among other things, require consumers to be
notified when they’re interacting with A.I., provide parental controls on A.I.
chatbots and put guardrails around the use of A.I. in mental health counseling.
Speaking on CNN on Sunday, Senator Bernie Sanders suggested a moratorium on new
data center construction. “Frankly, I think you’ve got to slow this process
down,” he said.
Yet a
number of leading Democrats are bullish on A.I., hoping to attract technology
investments to their states and, perhaps, burnish their images as optimistic
and forward-looking. “This technology is going to be a game changer,” Gov. Josh
Shapiro of Pennsylvania said at an A.I. summit in October. “We are just at the
beginning of this revolution, and Pennsylvania is poised to take advantage of
it.” He’s started a pilot program to get more state employees using generative
A.I. at work, and, by streamlining permitting processes, he has made the
building of A.I. data centers easier.
There are
obvious rewards for politicians who jump on the A.I. train. These companies are
spectacularly rich and preside over one of the few sectors of the economy that
are growing. Amazon has announced that it will spend at least $20 billion on
data centers in Pennsylvania, which Shapiro touts as the largest private sector
investment in his state’s history. At a time of national stagnation, A.I. seems
to promise dynamism and civic rejuvenation.
Yet a
survey published in early December shows that most Pennsylvanians, like most
Americans more broadly, are uneasy about A.I. The poll, conducted by Emerson
College, found broad approval of Shapiro but doubt about one of his signature
issues. Most respondents said they expected A.I. to reduce the number of
available jobs, and pluralities thought it would harm the economy and the
environment. Notably, given that health care is one of the sectors where A.I.
shows the most promise, 59 percent of health care workers in the survey were
pessimistic about the technology. Seventy-one percent of respondents said they
thought A.I. posed a threat to humanity.
One major
question, going into 2026, is which party will speak for the Americans who
abhor the incursions of A.I. into their lives and want to see its reach
restricted. Another is whether widespread public hostility to this technology
even matters given all the money behind it. We’ll soon start to find out not
just how much A.I. is going to remake our democracy, but also to what degree we
still have one.
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