We All Hate AI, but if You’re Poor, It Can Really Ruin Your Life

Luxury brands have always touted the craftsmanship of their products, but in recent months, human artistry itself has become their advertising strategy. Hermès redesigned its entire website around hand-drawn illustrations by French artist Linda Merad, who said the brand wanted visitors to recognize that “the art was created by a human.” Fashion houses Chanel and Loewe commissioned human illustrators to create their recent social media campaigns. Over the holidays, Porsche released an ad combining hand-drawn illustrations and 3D animation – a choice that seemed apt, following viciously mocked generative AI ads from Coca-Cola and McDonald’s. Last February, Gucci became a wake-up call when it drew the ire of fashionistas after using AI in its advertisements. “All luxury brands that used AI garbage should not be considered[ed] “Luxury is no more,” one viral post read. Another says: “The whole point of luxury is that someone cares.”

As automation and AI become ubiquitous, human contact has become a luxury good. In some ways, this may seem like just a continuation of a theme: The rich get great customer service while the rest of us are stuck pressing “1” and “2” and shouting “speak to an agent” into the blanks of the automated phone tree. This may seem like just another symptom of the broader intensification of our era and our plutocratic economic order. And most of us don’t like it. Studies confirm widespread skepticism: A 2025 Pew survey found that half of Americans were more concerned than excited about the rise of AI, and about 60% said they would like to have more control over the use of AI in their own lives.

And yet, it is the poor who suffer the most severe uses. Today, debt collectors use AI to stalk people via phone, email, and chatbots. AI deepfakes are poised to worsen criminal justice disparities. Parole decisions are made by AI systems. And increasingly, federal and state officials are outsourcing public decision-making and oversight to digital machines.

As TechTonic Justice, a nonprofit that tracks technologies harmful to low-income communities, noted in a November 2024 report, governments use AI in public programs when they seek to reduce costs under the guise of ensuring that only the “right” people receive services. But any error made by an automated system immediately snowballs: Such systems can create “immense suffering at scales and speeds that were impossible with the human-centered methods that preceded them,” the researchers found. After decades of austerity rooted in anti-Black and anti-poor policies, the American safety net is already worn out; these same biases are now coded into digital tools that, like all AI, reproduce the biases of their training data and their programmers. A human bureaucrat can only destroy so many lives in a day; algorithms can ruin the lives of tens of thousands of people at once.

Every state now uses AI to determine Medicaid eligibility, according to TechTonic Justice. For the 73 million people enrolled in the program, automated systems are increasingly deciding whether to approve or deny health treatments. The nearly 14 million Americans who receive disability benefits through the Social Security Administration are subject to decisions shaped by AI, which is also used by the Department of Housing and Urban Development; in fraud detection for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program; and making predictions of neglect in child welfare investigations. Indeed, across the social safety net, decisions about who gets help and who gets denied will increasingly be left to machines. (Just as the Porsche ad was released, the Trump administration quietly awarded Palantir a no-bid contract for an AI system to track suspected fraud by SNAP recipients.) In fact, as TechTonic Justice researchers reported, “the 92 million low-income people in the United States…have a fundamental aspect of their lives decided by AI.”

In 2013, for example, cash-strapped Michigan instituted an automated system to eliminate fraud in its unemployment insurance program. Over a two-year period, the system brought fraud charges against more than 60,000 people, more than five times the number identified by previous human-led investigations. Despite the lack of human review of these findings, the state began demanding reimbursement; court documents noted that “punitive assessments regularly totaled between $10,000 and $50,000 and sometimes exceeded $187,000.” Three years later, Michigan’s auditor general found that 93 percent of those claims were false. By that time, thousands of people had been arrested, bankrupted and deported, and at least one person had committed suicide. In 2022, Michigan owed $20 million in settlement costs to plaintiffs who signed a class-action lawsuit.

In Arkansas, an automated system mistakenly removed nursing and other home support services for about 4,000 people with severe disabilities. When families asked why services had been cut, they were simply told that “it was the computer that did it.” (A court ruled that the state must stop using the system.) In Minnesota and Kentucky, ongoing class-action lawsuits allege wrongful denials of care in cases where insurers used AI to ignore doctors’ recommendations and deny elderly patients’ Medicare Advantage claims. In Illinois and Los Angeles County, the automated systems used to determine child welfare referrals were so error-prone that both jurisdictions have now stopped using them.

Research firm Forrester predicts that AI and automation will eliminate 6% of all jobs, or about 10 million positions, by 2030. That outlook looks sunny compared to a 2025 Senate report that predicted some 100 million Americans could lose their jobs to AI over the next 10 years. There’s a new digital divide, and the less money you have to get by, the bigger the role AI will have in your life.