Artificial intelligence will lead to some firms to wither, and others to boom, and even the booming ones may lay off workers. Such dramatic changes in the economy and to workers will make politicians jump into action, who are likely to look to the public mood to draft policies. Most people’s mood, however, is formed through mediated sociotropic evaluations of whether AI is a good or a bad thing. We design and study two interlocking survey-experiments conducted in the U.K. and the U.S. that examine how different economic outcomes for regionally known and relevant firms make people choose whether to engage with the corresponding news and how such stories affect general sentiments toward AI. These sentiments, we posit, act as a mediator for policy preferences. We theorize that there is a pervasive negativity bias, that regardless of whether a firm waxes or wanes, what attracts media attention and affects moods toward AI depends on whether a company lays off workers.