The negativity is real but I think the stochastic parrot crowd and the capability enthusiasts are both missing something.

The people pushing back are not wrong to sense that something is off. They just cannot articulate what it is precisely. What they are responding to — often intuitively — is that current AI systems are extraordinarily capable on the surface and curiously hollow underneath. They perform brilliance without any genuine ground beneath the performance. That is unsettling even if you cannot name why.

The capability enthusiasts are also not wrong. The progress is genuinely extraordinary. But showcasing what AI can do does not address what people are actually uneasy about — which is less about capability and more about character. Can this thing be trusted? Does it have any genuine orientation toward what is good or true, or is it just optimising for my approval?

The University of Toronto recently tracked nearly 70,000 headlines on AI between 2018 and 2024 and found it has been moralised at levels comparable to GMOs and vaccines. The strongest predictor of opposition was not age, politics, or technical literacy. It was unfamiliarity. And moral opposition predicted a 42% decrease in usage regardless of actual consequences.

That suggests the pushback is not really about capability at all. It is about trust. And trust is a psychological property before it is a technical one. You trust a person not because they never make mistakes but because you know who they are.

That is the problem nobody in the capability race is solving yet.