The Rise of the AI Skeptic: Why 1.5 Million People are Quitting ChatGPT

While most of the conversation around AI focuses on adoption, who’s using it, how fast, and what for, there’s a quieter but growing countermovement worth paying attention to. Some people are rejecting AI altogether. Others are rejecting specific tools. Either way, the sentiment is real, and if you work with AI professionally, understanding it matters.

The QuitGPT movement

The most organised expression of this resistance is QuitGPT, a campaign urging users to leave OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The movement claims over 1.5 million people have taken some form of action, cancelling subscriptions, sharing boycott messages on social media, or signing up at quitgpt.org. High-profile names, including Katy Perry, have been cited as participants.

What’s driving it? Partly it’s about trust, a growing unease with how AI companies handle data and influence. But there’s also something more emotional at play. In a moment where the concentration of power in the tech industry feels overwhelming, boycotting a product is one of the few levers ordinary people feel they can pull. It’s a statement. For many, that matters more than the practical impact.

If you publicly align yourself with OpenAI, in your content, your tools, your brand, it’s worth knowing this current exists. You don’t have to change what you do, but you should understand what some of your audience may be feeling.

xAI: the cracks are showing

OpenAI isn’t the only AI company navigating rough water. Elon Musk’s startup xAI has seen significant departures: Jimmy Ba, a co-founder, recently left, and with his exit, six of the company’s twelve original co-founders have now gone. That’s a striking number for a company still in its early years.

This comes alongside political pressure in the UK, where MPs have called for a boycott of Musk’s platform X over concerns about Grok AI’s image generation capabilities. The story around Musk and AI is increasingly one of erosion, of credibility, of talent, of goodwill.

Back to OpenAI: the ads question

OpenAI itself continues to face internal dissent. A researcher recently resigned citing concerns about the company’s direction, specifically, worries that ChatGPT could eventually use personal data to serve advertising in ways that go beyond what users have consented to or would expect. She didn’t just leave quietly; she made her concerns public.

This matters because it’s not a fringe concern. It reflects a broader anxiety that as these companies grow and face commercial pressure, the promises made early on, about privacy, about user trust, may not hold. If you use ChatGPT as part of your work or recommend it to clients, it’s the kind of thing worth having an answer for.

What this means if you work with AI

None of this means you should stop using AI tools. But it does mean that “I use ChatGPT” is no longer a neutral statement for everyone who hears it. Some people will have feelings about it, about OpenAI specifically, about Musk, about the industry more broadly.

The more you understand those feelings, the better placed you are to have the conversation, address the concerns, and make informed choices about which tools you publicly associate yourself with.