A new poll by the Pew Research Center has found that Americans are getting extremely fed up with artificial intelligence in their daily lives.
A whopping 53 percent of just over 5,000 US adults polled in June think that AI will "worsen people’s ability to think creatively." Fifty percent say AI will deteriorate our ability to form meaningful relationships, while only five percent believe the reverse.
While 29 percent of respondents said they believe AI will make people better problem-solvers, 38 percent said it could worsen our ability to solve problems.
The poll highlights a growing distrust and disillusionment with AI. Average Americans are concerned about how AI tools could stifle human creativity, as the industry continues to celebrate the automation of human labor as a cost-cutting measure.
The "generally pessimistic" opinions about AI are significantly more widespread than they were before the advent of OpenAI's ChatGPT just under three years ago, Pew noted.
Half of respondents said they were "more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life," an increase from just 37 percent in 2021.
Only ten percent said they were "more excited than concerned," indicating that most Americans simply do not share the extremely optimistic views of tech leaders selling AI products.
It's an especially pertinent topic as the lines between AI-generated content and reality continue to blur. AI tools are becoming increasingly proficient at outputting photorealistic images, while text generators are hallucinating facts and convincing users they're real.
According to Pew's latest poll, 53 percent of respondents said they were "not too or not at all confident" about their ability to discern between whether something was "made by AI versus a person."
Yet 76 percent said it was "extremely or very important to be able to tell if pictures, videos and text were made by AI or people."
All this growing disillusionment and distrust could be related to an increase in tech literacy.
A recent study published in the Journal of Marketing by an international team of researchers earlier this year found that AI's biggest fans tend to be the people with the shallowest familiarity with the tech.
"Contrary to expectations revealed in four surveys, cross-country data and six additional studies find that people with lower AI literacy are typically more receptive to AI," the paper found.
In other words, the cat may be out of the bag, with fewer people perceiving AI as "magical" and experiencing "feelings of awe" when using it.
Despite the negative reactions, the tech industry has remained steadfast in its belief that AI will ultimately usher in an "era of abundance," as American venture capitalist and noted AI proponent Marc Andreessen put it in a 2024 blog post.
Prominent companies also continue to push AI with a striking fervor, making it practically impossible to avoid in our daily lives.
At the same time, the AI backlash is growing stronger. People have clearly had enough.
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