What does the Public think about AI?

The Centre for the Governance of AI has published a report setting out the results of an empirical study across participants across Europe and North America as to the overall public perception towards artificial intelligence. A core finding of the report identifies a number of caveats and challenges on the interrogation of public perception. Public opinion is not universal and varies based on a number of geographic, demographic and external factors. Key findings include:

1. Increasing Awareness and Use: Awareness of AI has been steadily increasing, driven by its growing use and public discourse. Familiarity with AI is rising as people knowingly use AI-powered tools at scale for the first time. Younger generations are more favourable and are likely to use generative AI, with usage skewing towards males.
2. General public perceptions and risks: Overall public perception about AI is mixed, with growing concern than optimism as to its overall use and impacts. Concerns range from data privacy and transparency to existential risks like AI surveillance, cyber-attacks, and autonomous weapons. Factors impacting public attitudes such as performance, fairness, accountability, transparency, interpretability, and human-likeness influence reactions, trust, and preferences for AI systems. Individual differences in socio-demographics and psychographics also affect attitudes towards AI. Public attitudes towards AI are highly context-dependent, varying by task, application, domain, and system. The effect of system characteristics on acceptance and other attitudes also depends on the context.
3. AI driven unemployment: This perceived anxiety and hesitancy of the usage of AI, combined with the increased parameters, use cases and adoption of AI has led to increase in public concern as to AI increasing unemployment, automating roles previously undertaken by humans. These risks are often not unfounded, although the report highlights the overarching statistical trends that perception still, at least today, does not view labour automation as an overall existential threat for jobs
4. AI Governance: Statistical analysis indicates a trend towards public support for AI governance across various regulatory approaches, with a stronger endorsement where generative AI is adopted in more high-risk sectors which impact on safety and military operations. The overarching views on sector use of AI indicates that there is a wider public distrust in self-governance of AI use by companies, with a wider favourability towards a centralised government oversight.

The report concludes with an adoptive framework to assist in the understanding and synthesising of public perception towards the adoption of AI as well as public attitudes towards AI, providing a core framework outlining the results of the empirical research. This report then separately provides for a series of consumer, academic, policy, and industry driven recommendations to address and improve on the limitations in such understanding

If you would like to discuss how current or future regulations impact what you do with AI, please contact Tom Whittaker, Brian Wong, Lucy Pegler, Martin Cook, Liz Smith or any other member in our Technology team.

This article was written by Zac Bourne.

Citation: Dreksler, N., Law, H., Ahn, C., Schiff, D.S., Schiff, K.J., Peskowitz, Z. (2025). “What Does the Public Think About AI? An Overview of the Public’s Attitudes Towards AI and a Resource for Future Research”, Centre for the Governance of AI.

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