We use AI every day, but we don't trust the people who build it: the paradox according to Enrique Dans

A note: the content downloaded from this article is a paywall teaser (Medium flags it as a "member-only story") and the text cuts off literally mid-sentence, with an incomplete figure ("71% …"). This summary is therefore necessarily brief and limited to what the excerpt actually says, without completing or inventing the missing data.

The article starts from an MIT Technology Review piece titled "People really hate AI, so why can't they get enough?", which raises an apparent paradox: despite the distrust, fear and anger AI generates among broad sections of the population, its use keeps growing. The example cited is that of students who have booed speakers linked to AI and protested at graduation ceremonies over its impact on the labor market while, at the same time, using ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude more and more often.

The author's reading is that this is neither hypocrisy nor a new form of tech addiction, but something simpler: it is possible to value a tool and, at the same time, deeply distrust those who build it, how they intend to introduce it into people's lives and the consequences of that process. In other words, accepting the product's usefulness does not imply approving of the industry or its intentions.

The available excerpt offers several figures to illustrate that gap between use and trust: according to Pew Research Center, 49% of U.S. adults already use some chatbot and 24% do so daily, while 63% believe AI is advancing too fast. The OECD estimates that more than a third of the citizens of its 38 member countries used generative AI during 2025. Stanford's AI Index report, for its part, notes that 59% of those surveyed believe the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, although 52% say they are nervous about the technology. The text also begins to cite a University of Melbourne and KPMG study focused on Spain, according to which 72% of Spaniards accept or approve of AI, but the download breaks off just as it introduces a second percentage (71%) without it being possible to know exactly what it refers to, so that figure cannot be reproduced reliably.

Taken together, the available fragment suggests that the article's central argument is to distinguish between the practical adoption of AI, which is on a clear upward curve in several regions of the world, and trust in the industry that produces it, which remains low or ambivalent; but since this is a paywalled preview, the full development of that idea, as well as the author's final conclusions, are not available in the content received.