People Hate AI the Way They Hated Social Media — and They're Using It Anyway

A post on Bluesky this week captured something that keeps getting lost in the regulatory debate. The author — pragmatic, clearly exhausted by the usual arguments — pointed out that every indication suggests people hate what AI represents in culture, hate the big AI companies, and are using it anyway. "Just as happened with social media," they wrote, before pivoting to the part that landed: the answer isn't just regulating bad actors, it's building accountable, public alternatives. The post got 35 likes in a community where 12 likes means you've said something real. It's a small number, but the framing is doing a lot of work.

The comparison to social media's arc is the uncomfortable part. Bernie Sanders was also circulating on Bluesky this week — a quote about children forming emotional dependencies on AI while becoming isolated from human beings, bracketed by his own rhetorical question: "Does anyone think the past 20 years of social media have been good for children's mental health?" It's a fair question that also happens to be unanswerable in a way that forecloses action. A separate post, more bluntly anxious, argued that AI has the capacity to take the harms facilitated by social media and "turbocharge them" — and that without federal regulatory guardrails, we're doomed to repeat the Facebook era's mistakes at a much higher cost. These two posts sat in the same community on the same day and don't quite agree about what the problem is. Sanders and the Bluesky regulation hawks think the mistake was building the thing at all without guardrails. The pragmatist thinks the mistake was building the thing and then handing it to a small number of corporations who had no reason to serve the public.

The historical comparison has a limit that none of these posts quite grapple with. The dot-com boom didn't generate this level of loathing — one Bluesky user noted this week, somewhat baffled, that the AI bubble has produced an intensity of public contempt that the website-builders of the late 1990s never inspired. The obvious explanation is that Facebook and the social platforms that followed it trained an entire generation to recognize the pattern: excitement, adoption, dependency, then the gradual discovery of what you traded away. People are applying that template to AI before the bill comes due. Which is either wisdom or premature cynicism — but it's why the public conversation feels allergic to optimism in a way that the arxiv preprint authors, whose papers on AI and social media tilt positive, clearly don't expect.

The pragmatist's framing — public alternatives over regulatory punishment — is probably right about one thing: regulation of the Meta-scale social platforms came too late to change what those platforms had already built into their incentive structures. Whether the same window exists for AI, and whether anyone with the institutional capacity to build a genuine public alternative is actually going to do it, is a different question. The people on Bluesky debating this aren't naive. They watched the last cycle. They're just not sure which lesson to apply.