Most Americans still have no idea what artificial intelligence can actually do.
Their experience with AI largely begins and ends with the viral frenzy of 2022 when they opened ChatGPT asked it to write a poem or make a joke, played around with image generators, and then moved on with their lives. That version of AI is already ancient history. The technology has advanced at an extraordinary pace and today these systems can research, write, analyze documents, control and do anything on your computer, generate software, automate workflows, create media, and increasingly operate as agents capable of completing complicated tasks with limited supervision. The gap between what AI can actually do and what the average American thinks it can do has become enormous.
At the same time public hostility toward the infrastructure powering this technology is growing rapidly. Across the country communities are organizing against massive data center projects, raising concerns about electricity prices, water consumption, noise, land use, and the strain these facilities can place on local infrastructure. The technology industry tends to dismiss these people as those who do not understand progress, but I think that completely misses the point. Americans are not necessarily rejecting technology. They are rejecting a technology industry they no longer trust, and in many cases that industry has done very little to earn their trust. The problem is Silicon Valley itself, not even necessarily the data centers.
The fundamental problem is that Silicon Valley often views communities through the lens of efficiency rather than human flourishing. A technology executive looks at a rural county and see cheap land, available megawatts, transmission capacity, tax incentives, and water access. The people who live there see their home. If a corporation arrives, drops a massive industrial complex into a community, consumes enormous amounts of power and water, changes the landscape, and potentially raises costs while offering residents little obvious benefit, it should not be surprising when people push back.
You cannot continually ask ordinary Americans to absorb the downside of technological development while the upside flows primarily to enormous corporations hundreds or thousands of miles away. You need to tell them what is actually in it for them. What are the tangible benefits? Will their towns be generating massive amounts of tax revenue? Will they get a dividend on profits from that data center so they can better provide for their families? Will the company running the data center pledge millions of dollars towards improving the local community and building new schools, parks, etc?
This is why I believe the debate over data centers is ultimately a debate about purpose. Technology should serve people, families, communities, and the nation. It should help a father provide for his family, help a small business compete with a larger corporation, help a builder work more efficiently, help parents educate their children, and help ordinary people reclaim time from repetitive work. Silicon Valley spends huge amounts of energy talking about parameters, compute, benchmarks, valuations, and efficiency, but the more important question is much simpler: does this technology actually make people more capable and improve their lives?
That is the vision we are pursuing with Gab.ai. I do not want artificial intelligence to remain some mysterious technology controlled by a small class of programmers, venture capitalists, corporate executives, and Silicon Valley insiders. I want normal people to understand it and use it, and I especially want conservatives and people on the Right to stop treating AI as something happening somewhere else. We have spent far too much time arriving late to new technologies only after the institutions surrounding them have already been built and captured by people who are hostile to us. We cannot make that mistake again with artificial intelligence.
AI is going to touch nearly every business, profession, school, church, political organization, and household in the country. Whether someone is excited about that or skeptical of it does not change the fact that the technology is here and improving rapidly. The people who learn how to use these tools will have enormous leverage over those who refuse to learn them. That does not mean everyone needs to become a machine-learning engineer. It means people need to understand how to communicate with AI effectively, how to use it for research, writing, analysis, organization, automation, and problem-solving, and how to incorporate it into their daily work without becoming dependent on it.
That is why we built the Gab AI Learning Center at gab.ai/learn. We have roughly two hours of lessons covering the basics of getting started with artificial intelligence, designed for people who may have little or no technical background. My goal is to see millions of people on the Right learn these skills. I want small business owners using AI to compete with corporations that have entire departments doing work one person can increasingly accomplish with the right tools. I want independent writers, entrepreneurs, parents, churches, tradesmen, farmers, and creators learning how to use AI to become more productive and more independent.
I know the benefits are real because I use this technology every day. I have AI agents handling repetitive work that once consumed enormous portions of my time, and the most valuable result is not some abstract increase in productivity. It is time. If AI allows me to accomplish in two hours what once took eight, I do not want to spend the remaining six hours staring at another screen. I want to take my family out for ice cream on a Tuesday afternoon, spend more time with my children, tend to my home, read, think, and build. The best use of AI is not to make human beings more machine-like. It is to let machines handle more mechanical work so that human beings have more freedom to be human.
The backlash against data centers deserves to be taken seriously. The public sees enormous corporations spending hundreds of billions of dollars on AI infrastructure, consuming more energy, buying more land, and promising that some incredible future is just around the corner, while many ordinary people have yet to experience a meaningful benefit from any of it. The answer is to make the progress useful and beneficial to them.
If AI gives a small business owner ten hours of his week back, helps a father build a side business, helps a homeschool family create better educational materials, helps a contractor organize his jobs, or helps an independent creator compete with a media corporation, people will understand its value very quickly. That is the future I want Gab.ai to help build: not artificial intelligence as another mechanism for centralization and control, but AI as a practical tool placed into the hands of families, entrepreneurs, builders, creators, churches, and communities.
The technology is moving whether we participate or not. I would rather see the Right understand it, master it, build with it, and help shape where it goes than spend the next decade complaining that our opponents got there first. The opportunity is here. We should learn how to use it.
