You take a non working technology and threaten workers with it as part of a global scheme to depress wages, and hey, bonus, the technology probably appears smart because it just wantonly steals everyone else's work and then passes it off as it's own.

How different would AI sentiment be if this never happened?

It wouldn't exist.

Who would buy this?

Show me any "little guy" suddenly competing with the "big guys" due to "AI." Any single examples? Remember the dawn of the internet? Where this very thing was happening every day?

The writing is on the wall. People imagine they're going to turn their $2500 computer into a butler and never work again so their brains are just shut off to the obvious.