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Conference & Journal Paper

Exciting, Useful, Worrying, Futuristic: Public Perception of Artificial Intelligence in 8 Countries

Patrick Gage Kelley, Yongwei Yang, Courtney Heldreth, Christopher Moessner, Aaron Sedley, Andreas Kramm, David T. Newman, Allison Woodruff

Proceedings of the 2021 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES '21), 627–637, 2021

May 2021

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Abstract

As the influence and use of artificial intelligence (AI) have grown and its transformative potential has become more apparent, many questions have been raised regarding the economic, political, social, and ethical implications of its use. Public opinion plays an important role in these discussions, influencing product adoption, commercial development, research funding, and regulation. In this paper we present results of an in-depth survey of public opinion of artificial intelligence conducted with 10,005 respondents spanning eight countries and six continents. We report widespread perception that AI will have significant impact on society, accompanied by strong support for the responsible development and use of AI, and also characterize the public's sentiment towards AI with four key themes (exciting, useful, worrying, and futuristic) whose prevalence distinguishes response to AI in different countries.

Cite this paper
@inproceedings{kelley2021exciting,
  title     = {Exciting, Useful, Worrying, Futuristic: Public Perception of Artificial Intelligence in 8 Countries},
  author    = {Kelley, Patrick Gage and Yang, Yongwei and Heldreth, Courtney and Moessner, Christopher and Sedley, Aaron and Kramm, Andreas and Newman, David T. and Woodruff, Allison},
  year      = {2021},
  doi       = {10.1145/3461702.3462605},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3461702.3462605},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2021 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES '21), 627–637, 2021},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  address   = {New York, NY, USA},
}
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