A new Yahoo/YouGov survey reveals that the majority of Americans have a pessimistic outlook on the future of artificial intelligence, with 53 percent believing that AI is likely to “destroy humanity” someday.
Yahoo News reports that the rapid advancements in AI technology have been making headlines recently, from the launch of OpenAI’s AI-powered web browser ChatGPT Atlas to Nvidia becoming the first publicly traded company to surpass $5 trillion in market value. However, a recent Yahoo/YouGov poll suggests that the general public’s perception of AI and its potential impact on their lives is far more pessimistic than that of Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
The survey, conducted in late October, polled 1,770 U.S. adults and found that while a majority of Americans who have used AI chatbots (85 percent) find them at least somewhat helpful, many are concerned about the future implications of this technology. Over half of the respondents (55 percent) reported seeing AI-generated content online either every day or frequently, with 59 percent complaining that they encounter such content “too often.”
One of the primary concerns highlighted by the poll is the difficulty in distinguishing between human-created content and AI-generated content. A majority of Americans (56 percent) admitted to having mistaken AI-generated content for real content at some point, and while 54 percent expressed confidence in their own ability to tell the difference, only 21 percent believed that others could do the same.
The survey also revealed that Americans are divided on the impact AI will have on their personal lives and intelligence. Only 16 percent of respondents believed that AI chatbots make them smarter, while 30 percent felt that AI makes them smarter in some ways but dumber in others. Similarly, just 17 percent of Americans think AI will have a mostly positive effect on their lives, while 32 percent expect a mostly negative impact.
When it comes to AI’s potential impact on humanity as a whole, the outlook is even bleaker. The poll presented four predictions about AI’s future and asked respondents to rate their likelihood of coming true. While 60 percent believed it was somewhat or very likely that AI would help solve complex problems like curing cancer, 63 percent also thought it was likely that AI would become so advanced that humans would lose control over it. Strikingly, 53 percent of Americans said it was somewhat or very likely that “AI will destroy humanity.”
The number of Americans who considered it “very likely” that AI would eventually cure cancer (15 percent) was notably smaller than those who believed AI was very likely to destroy humanity (20 percent).
Read more at Yahoo News here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
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