Americans have a lot of worries about artificial intelligence. Like job losses and energy use. Even more so: political chaos.
All of that is a lot to blame on one new technology that was an afterthought to most people just a few years ago. Generative AI, in the few years since ChatGPT burst onto the scene, has become so ubiquitous in our lives that people have strong opinions about what it means and what it can do.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted Aug. 13-18 and released Tuesday dug into some of those specific concerns. It focused on the worries people had about the technology, and the general public has often had a negative perception. In this survey, 47% of respondents said they believe AI is bad for humanity, compared with 31% who disagreed with that statement.
Compare those results with a Pew Research Center survey, released in April, that found 35% of the public believed AI would have a negative impact on the US, versus 17% who believed it would be positive. That sentiment flipped when Pew asked AI experts the same question. The experts were more optimistic: 56% said they expected a positive impact, and only 15% expected a negative one.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll specifically highlights some of the immediate, tangible concerns many people have with the rapid expansion of generative AI technology, along with the less-specific fears about runaway robot intelligence. The numbers indicate more concern than comfort with those bigger-picture, long-term questions, like whether AI poses a risk to the future of humankind (58% agree, 20% disagree). But even larger portions of the American public are worried about more immediate issues.
Foremost among those immediate issues is the potential that AI will disrupt political systems, with 77% of those polled saying they were concerned. AI tools, particularly image and video generators, have the potential to create distorting or manipulative content (known as deepfakes) that can mislead voters or undermine trust in political information, particularly on social media.
Most Americans, at 71%, said they were concerned AI would cause too many people to lose jobs. The impact of AI on the workforce is expected to be significant, with some companies already talking about being “AI-first.” AI developers and business leaders tout the technology’s ability to make workers more efficient. But other polls have also shown how common fears of job loss are. The April Pew survey found 64% of Americans and 39% of AI experts thought there would be fewer jobs in the US in 20 years because of AI.
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But the Reuters/Ipsos poll also noted two other worries that have become more mainstream: the effect of AI on personal relationships and energy consumption.
Two-thirds of respondents in the poll said they were concerned about AI’s use as a replacement for in-person relationships. Generative AI’s human-like tone (which comes from the fact that it was trained on, and therefore replicates, stuff written by humans) has led many users to treat chatbots and characters as if they were, well, actual friends. This is widespread enough that OpenAI, when it rolled out the new GPT-5 model this month, had to bring back an older model that had a more conversational tone because users felt like they’d lost a friend. Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged that users treating AI as a kind of therapist or life coach made him “uneasy.”
The energy demands of AI are also significant and a concern for 61% of Americans surveyed. The demand comes from the massive amounts of computing power required to train and run large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. The data centers that house these computers are like giant AI factories, and they’re taking up space, electricity and water in a growing number of places.
