AI Experts and Public Diverge on AI's Impact: Pew Research Center Survey Reveals Stark Contrasts

Most Americans think AI won't improve their lives, survey says

US experts who work in artificial intelligence fields seem to have a much rosier outlook on AI than the rest of us. In a survey comparing views of a nationally representative sample (5,410) of the general public to a sample of 1,013 AI experts, the Pew Research Center found that "experts are far more positive and enthusiastic about AI than the public" and "far more likely than Americans overall to believe AI will have a very or somewhat positive impact on the United States over the next 20 years" (56 percent vs. 17 percent). And perhaps most glaringly, 76 percent of experts believe these technologies will benefit them personally rather than harm them (15 percent). The public does not share this confidence. Only about 11 percent of the public says that "they are more excited than concerned about the increased use of AI in daily life." They're much more likely (51 percent) to say they're more concerned than excited, whereas only 15 percent of experts shared that pessimism. Unlike the majority of experts, just 24 percent of the public thinks AI will be good for them, whereas nearly half the public anticipates they will be personally harmed by AI. Colleen McClain, a senior researcher for Pew Research Center, told Ars that a lack of studies examining "how the public's views lined up or did not line up with expert views" prompted the survey. Pew has spent the past four years surveying the public, observing that Americans have gradually grown more aware of AI and its potential. But the new survey found that as awareness grows, "the US public has become more concerned over recent years." They're especially worried about deepfakes, misinformation, job displacement, and bias. It suggests that many Americans still feel very unsure about what AI is, what it can do, and how it might affect them. Pew expected that the experts' perspective was a missing piece of the puzzle when it came to parsing public opinion amid ongoing debates about how AI fits into society today. To find US-based experts, Pew scoured AI conferences for "individuals who demonstrate expertise via their work or research in artificial intelligence or related fields" and created a list of authors and presenters. These conferences "covered topics including research and development, application, business, policy, social science, identity and ethics," featuring AI experts from industry and academia, as well as government and nonprofits. While Pew could not ensure the sample was nationally representative of all experts in the AI field -- which is very broad and hard to define -- the survey represents a first step in gleaning how the people most committed to advancing AI view emerging technologies today. Everyone agrees feds can't be trusted to govern AI Notably, Pew also found some common ground. Small percentages of each group expect AI will have a positive impact on news and elections, with most flagging concerns in these areas. And more than half of both sides agreed that they want more control over AI and do not trust the government to regulate AI -- predicting that the US will be too lax. "They are also largely skeptical of industry efforts around responsible AI," Pew's survey said. Last month, the White House fielded public comments for an AI Action Plan that will reveal to the public how the Trump administration intends to regulate AI. Among those who submitted comments was the nonprofit the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), which urged that more transparency and accountability are needed, as well as more public input. CDT recommended that the Trump administration seek public input and "evaluate and address risks to people's privacy, civil rights, civil liberties, and safety." In response to Pew's survey -- which was conducted prior to Donald Trump's election win last year -- CDT CEO Alexandra Reeve Givens told Ars that "AI's widespread adoption is contingent on user trust. Just as traffic lanes and seat belts help people drive faster, well-tailored laws and norms will help people know what AI tools they can rely on in their daily lives. Without those safeguards, it's no wonder the public is skeptical." Alex Hanna, the director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute, told Ars that the public and experts likely agree on regulation for a combination of reasons -- because distrust in government broadly is a common sentiment and experts commonly expect the government to lack a sufficient understanding of technologies. And while "diversity is under attack" in government currently, it will be necessary for officials to incorporate diverse views on AI since "worldviews do get baked into" AI technologies, Hanna said, and that can affect people's lives. Pew's survey found that experts and the public agreed that currently, "men's views are better represented in AI design than the views of women." University of Washington AI professor Emily Bender suggested that to break that pattern, the US needs to be more genuine about including more perspectives in AI development at a time when big tech companies are ditching DEI initiatives. "I think the through line is that these technologies are built to maintain the status quo and represent it as the norm," Bender told Ars. "What we really need is to move to a situation where the point of building this technology is for communities who are using it for their own purposes, have control over it, and decide when and how and where to use it." Americans using AI more than they know, experts say In a book due out this May, The AI Con, which provides guidance for policymaking and examines the human costs of profit-fueled corporate AI interests, Hanna and Bender work to help the public better understand AI's potential for good and bad. On their podcast Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, they hope to further public scholarship, not to ensure the public is aligned with AI experts, but to help people form their own opinions about AI. "We're trying to help people learn how to ask specific questions and understand automation in its context and sort of say, well, what's being automated and why?" Bender told Ars. Bender and Hanna suggested that the goal shouldn't be seeking alignment and total agreement but fielding a diversity of opinions from all sides of society that would ensure that AI makers truly understand how to plug AI into various industries and communities. "I think that there are folks out there, including us, who are trying to help people understand that everyone's expertise in their own field of work and personal relationships is really valuable," Bender said. "And the lens through which we should be evaluating any technology that somebody's trying to sell us is 'how does this actually work for me, for my community, and if I'm using it, or it's being used on me.'" Although it's too late for the public to weigh in on the AI Action Plan, Pew plans to continue monitoring public opinion of AI to help "everyday Americans' voices" be included in these broader debates, McClain told Ars. Without more public awareness, AI experts threaten to dominate debates, potentially pushing views on policymakers that do not reflect the greater public's feelings or readiness for AI adoption. That could quickly become a problem for many people who do not see the AI writing on the wall, Pew's survey suggested, since experts surveyed believe that Americans are already using AI more often than they think they are. Nearly 80 percent of experts responded that people likely use "AI almost constantly or several times a day," where only 27 percent of the public "think they interact with AI at this rate." "New developments and tools evolve at a rapid pace, it's going to be important to continue tracking public feelings about these and tracking public awareness," McClain told Ars. Americans do not expect AI to make them happy Among both the general public and AI experts, women were more likely to be wary of AI than men, Pew's survey found, with the gender divide between the random expert sample even wider than the public sample. The expert sample is not representative of the AI field, as Bender points out to Ars that AI is not a "thing" or even "a coherent set of technologies," and an expert in one area doesn't necessarily understand other areas. But still, Pew noted the key takeaway and conducted in-depth interviews to find out more about why men and women are or are not excited about AI. "I think, broadly, some of the things that excite me are things like applications that can save people a lot of time from repetitive and mundane tasks," one male expert respondent said, describing his excitement about automating workflows. A female respondent expressed concerns about biometrics collected at airports, noting, "Where's that data going? How is it being housed? Where is it being used for? Where is my consent? Can I really, truly say no, I don't want my picture taken, but what is the consequence of me saying that and still trying to make it to my flight at home?" But the "starkest" difference the survey found was in how AI experts and the public expect AI to impact jobs and the economy. The public is "more anxious than experts about job loss," Pew's survey said. Where 73 percent of experts said that "AI will have a very or somewhat positive impact on how people do their jobs over the next 20 years," that share dropped to 23 percent among US adults. And while 69 percent of experts think the economy will benefit from AI, just 21 percent of US adults predict the same. What's more, "few in the public think AI will outperform humans on any of the tasks" the Pew survey explored, including parole decisions, medical diagnoses, hiring decisions, driving, providing customer service, or writing a song. "Even as medical care is the one area in which the public is most optimistic about AI's impact, experts are 40 percentage points more likely than the general population to believe it will positively affect medical care" (84 percent vs. 44 percent), Pew found. Bender told Ars that pretending AI experts know best is likely problematic because "AI experts don't know very much about how people who work in other fields do their jobs, and the people who do those jobs are the ones who know what that's about." Further, because the survey lumps together experts who build the technology and experts who study its societal impacts, it may be "obscuring some very different takes on the technology in a way that is also gendered" since "women tend to be clustered in the critical technology studies areas." Hanna guessed the woman describing concerns about biometrics above is likely an example. Hanna said the survey is still helpful because it recruits a body of expertise to begin analyzing how views differ within the field and with the public. It perhaps helps push back against extreme narratives from tech leaders making "ridiculous" statements about a future that amounts to "fully automated communism," Hanna said, or predicting AI doomsdays. For Americans, the future of AI apparently looks bleak, not because it possibly spells the end of the world but because 83 percent don't think it will make them more productive and 94 percent believe it won't make them any happier. Only 13 percent of Americans think they'll ever get to a point where they trust AI to make a decision for them. Hanna told Ars that in some sectors, AI is already being used as an excuse not to hire more workers, and "even though that work is still there, it is being shoddily done, and it's possible that those people are being hired back at a fraction of their wage to look, and their work looks much more like gig work rather than more stable careers." By contrast, one female AI expert quoted in Pew's survey expressed excitement about AI despite how it may impact her job. "I'm excited about further automation of code, even though a lot of my job is software engineering, so that's in competition with my job. I am excited about making the process even simpler than it is right now," she said. "In general, I think of AI as helping people along jobs. So I think of the biggest outcome is automation of processes that feel very slow and feel like they don't necessarily require full brain power, being automated by AI."

Americans See Lots of Reasons to Worry About AI, Pew Survey Finds

Expertise artificial intelligence, home energy, heating and cooling, home technology People with expertise working with artificial intelligence tools are fairly confident that AI will have a positive effect in the next 20 years, but relatively few US adults feel the same way, according to the results of a Pew Research Center survey. The surge of generative AI tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT in the last few years has pushed the subject into the mainstream. Pew said the share of the public who say they're more concerned has risen since a similar survey in 2021. Among AI experts, 56% said they expected AI's impact on the US to be positive in the next 20 years. In contrast, only 17% of the public had that perspective, with 35% feeling AI will have a negative effect. (Among AI experts, 15% expected a negative impact.) A big reason for the gap is that ordinary Americans are far less optimistic about the effect that AI will have on important aspects of their lives, like the workplace, health care and education. While 73% of experts said they expected AI would improve how people do their jobs, only 23% of US adults surveyed felt the same, for example. Not all artificial intelligence works like the generative AI models that have risen in prominence since 2022, but the popularity of ChatGPT and other large language models like Google's Gemini has led to a race among tech companies and what can feel like a saturation campaign of AI features across everyday apps and devices. That's garnered mixed reactions from consumers. A 2024 CNET survey found many smartphone users unenthusiastic about AI integrations like Apple Intelligence. The Pew report released this week covers the results of a pair of surveys. US adults were polled as part of Pew's American Trends Panel, a survey of more than 5,000 randomly selected adults conducted in August 2024. The experts' opinions came from a panel of 1,013 people living in the US whose work or research relates to AI and who presented at or published at any of 21 different AI-focused conferences in 2023 and 2024. "These surveys reveal both deep divides and common ground on AI," the report said. "AI experts are far more positive than the public about AI's potential, including on jobs. Yet both groups want more personal control of AI and worry about lax government oversight." Neither group was optimistic that AI would lead to more jobs in the US in the next 20 years. Among AI experts, 19% expected more jobs, while 39% expected fewer. The skew was much greater among the general public -- 64% expect fewer jobs and only 5% expect more. As to which jobs were most at risk, both groups agreed that cashiers and journalists were vulnerable. Neither group had large numbers expecting job losses for mental health therapists, despite advances in the use of AI chatbots for therapy. A majority of AI experts, 61%, said they expected job losses for truck drivers, compared with just 33% for the general public. Driverless trucks have been a dream for the autonomous vehicle industry for far longer than ChatGPT has been a household word, although the survey may show that the idea hasn't caught on yet with the general public. One AI expert quoted anonymously in the report particularly highlighted truck drivers, saying, "They'll be gone in 10, 20 years probably." Even for jobs that continue to exist despite AI, the work done by humans might change. Nickle LaMoreaux, chief human resources officer at IBM, told an audience at South by Southwest last month that it will change the qualities companies look for in workers, forcing them to focus more on critical thinking and human qualities. Despite the hype, AI tools have yet to make much of a dent in many workplaces. A separate Pew survey released in February found only a sixth of US workers were using AI in their jobs and a majority said they don't use chatbots at all or use them rarely. The two groups were virtually mirror images on the question of whether people were more concerned or excited about the increased use of AI. Among the general public, 51% were more concerned, while 47% of AI experts said they were more excited. Experts quoted in the report pointed to things like the automation of repetitive tasks and the potential improvements in medicine as reasons for hope. "Most excited about the positive impact that it could have in the health industry," one expert said. The concerns, however, are significant. Issues like inaccurate information, impersonation (or "deepfakes") and the misuse of personal information were cited by both the public and the experts. The public reported being far more concerned about job loss than experts.

Most Americans don't trust AI -- or the people in charge of it

Kylie Robison is a senior AI reporter working with The Verge's policy and tech teams. She previously worked at Fortune Magazine and Business Insider. AI experts are feeling pretty good about the future of their field. Most Americans are not. A new report from Pew Research Center released last week shows a sharp divide in how artificial intelligence is perceived by the people building it versus the people living with it. The survey, which includes responses from over 1,000 AI experts and more than 5,000 US adults, reveals a growing optimism gap: experts are hopeful, while the public is anxious, distrustful, and increasingly uneasy. Roughly three-quarters of AI experts think the technology will benefit them personally. Only a quarter of the public says the same. Experts believe AI will make jobs better; the public thinks it will take them away. Even basic trust in the system is fractured: more than half of both groups say they want more control over how AI is used in their lives, and majorities say they don't trust the government or private companies to regulate it responsibly. That makes sense when you look at just how hard the US government has failed at basic tech regulation. Congress loves to haul big tech CEOs in for theatrical hearings where lawmakers fumble through questions about Section 230 that sound like they were written by someone who just discovered the internet yesterday. "It seems like when you look at these ... congressional hearings, they don't understand it at all. I don't know that I have faith that they would be able to bring on enough experts to understand it enough to regulate it, but I think it's very important," one academic expert said in the report. The public's skepticism about government AI regulation exists alongside the wildly ambitious claims of tech leaders about the future potential of AI. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he expects we may see "the first AI agents 'join the workforce' and materially change the output of companies" in 2025. That seems to show up in the data, too: few Americans believe they have any agency in the AI-driven future. Nearly 60 percent of US adults say they have little or no control over whether AI is used in their lives. That number isn't much better among experts. There are gender splits, too. Male AI experts are far more likely than women to say they feel optimistic and personally excited about AI. And when it comes to representation, both experts and the public agree that AI design reflects the perspectives of white men far more than women and Black or Hispanic communities. The diversity problem isn't just about who builds the models -- it's baked into how people experience the technology. While older generations debate the potential of AI, Gen Z is already living with it. A separate study released this week by Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation finds that Gen Z is highly engaged with AI tools like ChatGPT or Copilot -- 79 percent report using them, and almost half do so weekly. But that doesn't mean they trust it. In fact, Gen Z is more likely to say AI makes them feel anxious (41 percent) than excited (36 percent). Just 27 percent say it makes them feel hopeful. "Gen Z, they don't trust the government, they don't trust big tech companies, they don't trust the news," Zach Hrynowski, author of the Gallup report, told The Verge. Gen Z recognizes that AI will shape their future jobs and learning, but they're wary of its effects. Nearly half think AI will harm their "ability to think critically." And while most believe AI can help them work and learn more efficiently, only a third of Gen Z workers trust work done with or by AI as much as human output. Schools and workplaces aren't helping much, either. Most Gen Z students say their schools lack clear AI policies, and over half of Gen Z workers report the same about their employers. But the research shows that when institutions do have clear AI rules, young people are more likely to use the tools, trust them, and feel prepared for the future. AI may be advancing fast, but trust is lagging behind. The systems are getting smarter, but the people are skeptical -- especially the ones who will have to live with it the longest. "They haven't gotten to a point where they feel like the benefits outweigh the risks," Hrynowski said.

The General Public Is a Lot More Worried About AI Than AI Experts

The general public is far more pessimistic about the impact of AI than "AI experts" who work in the field, a new report from the Pew Center reveals. Well over half -- 57% -- of AI experts say AI will have a very or somewhat positive impact on the United States over the next 20 years, compared to just 17% of the general public. Meanwhile, over 43% of the US public believe that AI will hurt them rather than benefit them, in contrast to just 24% among experts. The expert-general public divide wasn't the only major split when it comes to how AI is being perceived. The research also picked up a huge split between the male and female experts they surveyed. Over six in 10 (63%) of the male experts agreed with the statement that AI will have a very or somewhat positive impact on the US over the next two decades, falling to 36% for women in the cohort. Just under a third of female experts (30%) said that AI made them more excited than concerned, compared to 53% of male experts. Some areas prompted a lot more fear and pessimism among respondents than others. Only 9% of people in the US feel that AI will have a positive impact on elections, amid widespread concerns about deepfakes, rising to 11% among experts (one of the few questions on which both demographics essentially agreed). One of the largest splits noted in the study was on how AI will impact the world of work. Only 23% of Americans predict AI will have a positive impact on how people do their jobs, compared to 73% of AI experts. Still, there are areas where large chunks of the US public are fairly optimistic about the impact of AI, such as in health care. As tech giants like Apple may be preparing to pivot toward AI-based medicine, about 44% of the US public believe that AI will have a positive impact on health care, which rises to 84% among experts. It shouldn't come as a huge surprise that the general public has concerns about the rise of AI. Some of the world's most famous people have been openly discussing the issue for years. Last month, Bill Gates said that humans won't be needed for "most things" in the coming age of AI in a prime-time TV segment, highlighting fields like medicine, teaching, and mental health as ripe for disruption. Meanwhile, former member of The Beatles Paul McCartney has warned that an incorrect approach to AI and creative industries could lead to lost livelihoods for musicians and other creators. The Pew Center surveyed about 5,400 adults to get its findings, including just over 1,000 experts, who had all spoken or presented at AI conferences in the past.