Many Americans are very concerned about AI. Can Mark Zuckerberg change his mind?

That’s what Meta’s CEO is trying to do, through a persuasion campaign: Last week, the company released an ad, set to a David Bowie song, telling viewers to ignore “some people” who don’t like AI.

Zuckerberg followed up a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Tuesday by promising that “superintelligence will be the most profound technological advance we will see in our lifetimes,” and that this will be a good thing. He later spoke by phone with reporters from the Journal, the Financial Times and the New York Times to say the same thing.

And on Wednesday, Zuckerberg used his company’s earnings call to stay the tone: His company’s AI efforts make him “optimistic that we are building a positive future for everyone,” he told investors.

At least two things happen here:

• Zuckerberg, like many AI leaders, seems baffled by the reaction to AI in the United States. Like many of them, he believes the industry needs a better communications plan. One that sells the advantages of AI and downplays the not so good things.
• Zuckerberg, like many in the AI ​​space, seems particularly frustrated with OpenAI and Anthropic, whose CEOs have repeatedly warned that AI will cause serious disruption, including significant job losses. There is a school of thought that OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei have exaggerated the risks of AI to help justify their huge fundraising and valuation ambitions. So when Zuckerberg writes “I don’t understand why anyone who believes AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity’s relevance would rush to build that future,” in his WSJ op-ed, he’s talking about Altman and Amodei.

Let’s set aside whether Zuckerberg, or anyone at Meta, is the AI ​​industry’s best advocate (as of early 2025, two-thirds of Americans reported having a negative view of Zuckerberg).

My most important question is whether someone may convince Americans to feel more positive about AI.

It’s certainly possible that Americans would feel better about AI if Altman and Amodei hadn’t spent time warning them that the technology they were developing could lead to massive job losses. They might also have felt better if the broader tech industry, which is now essentially the AI ​​industry, had not publicly pledged allegiance to Donald Trump starting in late 2024.

But those things happened and I don’t think a messaging campaign is going to make people forget them. At this point, the way to convince people that AI will be good for them is to demonstrate that good things are actually happening.

This is because, right now, most of the benefits of AI are either theoretical or intensely concentrated among a few people, primarily people who work or invest in AI. If you’re selling a home in San Francisco, it’s easy to see a benefit from AI. For almost everyone else, it is something that could help you one day.

So while the industry waits for other advantages: new wonder drugs! New industries! Things so new that we still don’t have words to describe them! – to materialize, my advice to Meta and to everyone who wants to change public opinion on AI is simple: pay.

Teachers in rural Louisiana, where Meta is building a massive data center, will receive one-time bonuses of up to $50,000 this year. That payment does not come directly through Meta, but through a huge tax payment that Meta made as part of its development.

$50,000 doesn’t mean much to a Meta engineer. In Richland Parish, where Meta is building its data center, that money could be a year’s salary or much more.

So Mark, if you want people to feel good about AI and what you’re doing with it: do more of that.

Let all the smart people who work for you figure out the best way to do it: Direct payments to citizens? Money that goes to local government first and then becomes personal checks? Or maybe you just build a bunch of schools and roads and make sure everyone knows who paid for them.

Whatever it is, do it fast (you’re good at fast) so people know that AI is helping them now, not in the future. It might work better than videos and opinion pieces.