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

A post on Bluesky this week cut through the usual noise with unusual precision. "People hate what 'AI' represents in culture, hate the Big AI companies," it read, "and… are using it a lot. Just as happened with social media." The author wasn't celebrating this — they were diagnosing it. The post drew 35 likes, modest by viral standards, but the replies treated it like a mirror held up to something the AI and social media conversation keeps circling without ever quite naming: the most reviled technologies often win not because they earn goodwill but because they make themselves structurally unavoidable.

The parallel to Facebook isn't decorative — it's precise. A separate Bluesky post, the most-liked in the dataset this week, spelled out what that parallel implies. "AI has the capacity to take the harms facilitated by social media and turbocharge them," it warned, sharing a piece arguing that without federal regulatory guardrails, a repeat of the Facebook era is essentially baked in — just at higher magnitude and velocity. The framing matters: it's not that AI is new and unprecedented, it's that regulators already failed this test once and seem poised to fail it again. That's a harder argument to dismiss than the usual "AI is dangerous" beat, because it doesn't require predictions about the future — it just requires reading the recent past.

What makes this week's conversation unusual is the third voice running alongside the fear and the paradox: the structural critique. The pragmatic Bluesky post didn't stop at describing the adoption-loathing gap — it explicitly argued that "regulating the bad actors" is insufficient, and that accountable, public alternatives are what the moment actually demands. This is a different register of argument than most Bernie Sanders-quoting posts about children's mental health and artificial friendships, which dominated some of the more anxious corners of the conversation. The Sanders framing — AI enabling emotional dependency while social media has already damaged a generation — is viscerally effective but politically familiar. The public-alternatives argument is less emotionally resonant and harder to manufacture outrage about, which may be exactly why it keeps losing the discourse fight even when it's the more substantive position.

The dot-com comparison surfaced too, in a post noting that no previous tech boom generated "the intense loathing that the AI bubble has generated" — and wondering whether social media itself is simply amplifying the disgust this time, giving visibility to critics who would have been ignored in 2000. That's probably right, but it also understates something. The Facebook-era bargain was poorly understood until it was too late; the AI-era bargain is being articulated in real time, loudly, by people who watched the last one play out. The loathing isn't just louder — it's more informed. Whether that changes the outcome is the question nobody in this conversation seems willing to bet on, which is itself an answer.