Insights
Is there AI love in an "I hate AI" world?
Honestly? Yes — but it has to be earned. Half of Americans now say AI makes them more concerned than excited, and only one in ten feel the opposite, according to Pew Research Center's 2025 survey. The hate is real, and it deserves a real answer — not a sales pitch. Here is the most honest one we know: AI is not a job replacer. It is a task replacer. The difference between those two words is where the love quietly begins.
Why do so many people hate AI?
Because the fear underneath is about real things. Pew found concern about AI jumped from 37% of Americans in 2021 to 50% in 2025 — and when researchers listen closely, the distrust gathers around three losses: losing a livelihood, losing human connection, and losing control to something whose reasoning we cannot see. None of those fears is silly. Every great technology has provoked versions of them. What makes AI different, sociologically, is that it appears to think — so it feels less like a tool and more like a rival. That perception deserves to be named out loud, because no one can answer a fear that is never allowed to be spoken.
From the field
A clinician at a large group practice we serve said it to us plainly during a training: "I hate AI. I didn't go into healthcare to be replaced by a machine." We didn't argue. We asked which parts of her week she would gladly hand to a machine tonight. "The insurance documentation," she said, without a breath of hesitation. Six weeks later, AI was drafting those documents for human review — and she had become its most vocal defender in the building. Nothing she loved was taken. Only the part she had never loved.
Is the fear of being replaced actually true?
Here is the truth as carefully as we can tell it. Economists describe every job as a bundle of tasks — and research from the London School of Economics shows AI takes over individual tasks, while strongly bundled work — where judgment, skill, and relationship are woven together — keeps the human at the center. Healthcare is the strongest bundle there is: ethics, touch, clinical judgment, and presence cannot be unbundled from the person providing them. And watch what the people closest to the technology actually do: the American Medical Association's 2026 survey found 81% of physicians now use AI professionally, up from 38% in 2023 — with more than three-quarters saying it improves their ability to care for patients. The profession most loudly called "threatened" examined the machine up close and voted with its hands.
81%
of physicians now use AI in their work — up from 38% in 2023 (American Medical Association, 2026). The clinicians closest to the technology moved from fear to usefulness fastest.
So where does the love come in?
The love was never going to be for the technology. It is for what the technology hands back. Aim AI at the tasks that pull your people away from people — the documentation, the scheduling, the follow-up drafting — and keep humans unmistakably in front, owning judgment and relationship. Patients feel that difference; public discomfort with AI in care softens in exactly one circumstance, and it is that one. If your practice is standing in an "I hate AI" moment, start there: let your team say their fears out loud without correction, then let the first project be a task nobody will miss. The love arrives quietly, disguised as recovered attention — an unhurried answer, a face looked at instead of a screen, a practitioner who goes home less hollowed out than last year.
We never ask anyone to love AI. We ask what they would do with an hour handed back to them every day — and nearly everyone, it turns out, would spend it on a person. That is the whole secret, and the honest answer to the question. The machine earns its place by giving the human theirs. In an "I hate AI" world, that is a kind of love — and it is the only kind worth building for.