Software and Services

Consumer confidence in AI growing

12 March 2024
Source: Stony Brook

Artificial intelligence (AI) development is growing at a rapid pace and becoming normalized in consumer’s daily lives. While there are advantages to developing these systems, what are the feelings of consumers about this new technology?

According to a new study from two Stony Brook University professors, more adults have gained confidence in the capabilities of AI while at the same time have grown passionate about not extending such systems human rights.

Many adults strongly believe that an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system could potentially be built. An AGI system is one where a computer system can perform any intellectual task a human is capable of.

However, it is unclear if consumers believe a system should be built at all and are adamant about not giving such a system the same rights as humans.

The study was conducted in two different groups of nearly 500 Americans that were age 18 or above. One group was surveyed in March 2021 and another in April 2023. They compared the data between the groups using Google Surveys. The comparison showed how consumer confidence grew after the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022.

“What we truly wanted to know was the distribution and average of public opinion in the U.S. population,” said Jason Jones, associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Stony Brook. “A random, representative sample is the gold standard for estimating that in survey research. Google shut down their Google Surveys product in late 2022, so we used another platform called Prolific to do the same thing for the second sample.”

The full research can be found in the journal Seeds of Science.

To contact the author of this article, email PBrown@globalspec.com


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