Is AI the Problem, or Is It Me?

I have something to confess.

I’ve become obsessed with Claude Code. Over the past few months, I’ve built about a half dozen customized software tools that I’ve wished were on the market for years.

I built a contacts app. Then an email client. Then a full documentary editing tool that allows me to work smoothly from transcripts to video. One guy, on nights and weekends, completing projects that until now would have required a team, a budget, and months of development.

It’s the most exciting creative experience I’ve had in years. I’m a super nerd, and I’ve lost my mind over what is now possible.

In the midst of my workaholic bender, my wife sent me this article: Meet the Sad Wives of AI. I got the hint.

I tell you this because I think what’s happening to me, the excitement and the productivity alongside the compulsion and the impact on the people I love, is the actual story of AI right now. Not the hype, the doom, or the stock prices, but how it’s changing us in our homes and our habits before we’ve had a chance to decide whether we’re okay with this.

Public opinion has shifted on AI, and it’s shifted fast.

At commencement ceremonies this spring, speakers’ references to AI have not exactly been warmly received. At the University of Arizona, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was met with sustained jeering when he brought it up. At UCF, the commencement speaker told a room full of graduates that “the rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution,” triggering a wave of boos. She awkwardly froze mid-speech, clearly rattled, before pressing on with the rest of her remarks.

A recent Gallup survey found that Gen Z’s relationship with AI is genuinely conflicted. More than half use it regularly, but nearly a third say it makes them feel angry, and nearly half of those in the workforce think the risks to their jobs outweigh any benefits.

Google I/O 2026, the company’s flagship annual showcase, was another defining moment. Google announced AI everything: AI search, AI Gmail, AI glasses, a whole “agentic Gemini era.” The keynote has racked up over 9 million views on YouTube with only 30 thousand likes. That’s an engagement rate of about 0.3%. For comparison, Dad Saves America averages 4-5% on our videos. In the aftermath of this PR disaster, DuckDuckGo leaned hard into its “No AI” messaging against Google and saw installs spike.

It took social media over a decade, and the 2016 election, before the country soured on it. AI has managed the same trick in about three years.

It’s worth noting that some of this backlash isn’t entirely organic. A recent report from the Bitcoin Policy Institute identified coordinated foreign influence operations targeting Americans with anti-AI messaging, implicating Chinese state media and US-based nonprofits receiving foreign and CCP-aligned funding. I don’t know how large a share of American public opinion that explains, but it’s not zero.

One thing I do think is driving authentic backlash is something much more straightforward. The people building this stuff keep telling us it’s going to be catastrophic. Sam Altman has spoken of the need to renegotiate the social contract for the coming civilizational upheaval. In 2014, Elon Musk publicly suggested that AI development might be akin to summoning a demon.

Gen Z has been told that the machines are coming for them. We can’t be shocked that they have a problem with that.

As a Catholic, I was excited to hear that Pope Leo XIV would address the implications of AI for humanity in his first encyclical. He chose the name Leo quite deliberately, so it’s no surprise that he’s taking this issue seriously. In 1891, the last Pope Leo grappled with how the Industrial Revolution was transforming society, and now we’re facing a similar moment.

The encyclical is long and wide-ranging, touching on employment, warfare, and relationships. However, the core theme is that, in our rush to become more efficient, we risk becoming less human.

One strange detail of the encyclical was who was standing beside the Pope when he presented it. Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah, a self-described atheist, was invited to Rome to hear the Church’s concerns firsthand. He spoke honestly, sharing that his team has found mysterious emergent properties inside their models that mirror human introspection and emotion. Olah affirmed that the Church’s voice is needed precisely because these questions are bigger than computer science.

I don’t fully know what to make of the Anthropic-Vatican relationship. There’s a cynical read that Anthropic is ringing the alarm bells to promote regulatory barriers against their competition and is laundering that strategy through the Church. But I’m choosing to take it more charitably. The questions being raised are real and the people raising them seem genuinely concerned.

Where I land on AI, at least for now, is somewhere between the boos and the boosters.

This technology is genuinely extraordinary. What I’ve been able to build in a few months, alone at night, would not have been possible before. The agentic shift, models that can read and write files, execute tasks over hours, and work while you sleep, is a qualitatively different experience from the first two years of ChatGPT, and it’s happening faster than most people expected.

It’s also eating my evenings, pulling me away from the people in front of me and toward the screens in my office. My friend Arthur Brooks, who wrote the English foreword to the encyclical, put forward a simple principle: use things and love people, not the other way around. I myself have experienced how AI can tempt you to get that backwards.

I’ve made a promise to my family: box it up, put it away, be present. It takes real effort. I am struggling with it. Our kids will struggle with it too.