Even before Donald Trump was sworn in for his second stint in the White House, he was promising to unleash “AI innovation” on an unprecedented scale.
Despite grumblings from the populist Republican sect, the billionaire-in-chief soon made good on those promises, cozying up to AI moguls like Sam Altman and promising to flip the US power grid on its head in order to feed the growing demand for AI data centers.
Now a year and a half into his second term, a growing number of Americans are clearly fed up with the president’s pandering to the tech industry. A new poll conducted by Upswing Research and Strategy in cooperation with the AI accountability group Guardrails Action surveyed Americans in New York’s 12th congressional district, a diverse tract encompassing parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.
Respondents, broadly, are very skeptical of Trump’s AI regime, with an enormous 79 percent saying their “top concern” with AI is that tech companies are “too close to Trump and helping him erode democracy.”
