🧠 The Understanders research: The concerns driving AI skepticism

We interviewed 105 people to test our earlier hypotheses about AI skepticism and, well... let's just say we proved the value of testing one's hypotheses

This is the second-ever release of original primary research findings from The Understanders. Many thanks to our friends at Genway, a research platform powered by AI agents, for providing complimentary use of their tool and access to research participants to study this topic!

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AI skepticism has been a recurring theme here at The Understanders lately. In the last couple of years, as AI has entered the public consciousness and discourse, much of the focus has been on the technology’s ever-improving capabilities, the flood of investment into it, and prognostications about its potential to benefit humanity and improve our day-to-day lives.

But AI skepticism— at least among the American public— is both real and measurably on the rise. The share of Americans saying AI will have a negative effect on both society and their own lives has risen meaningfully even in the last few months, according to data from YouGov and new data from Pew shows that twice as many Americans think AI will have a negative effect versus positive on the US over the next 20 years— a balance wildly out of step with that of AI experts.

Source: Pew Research Center

A piece in The New York Times Opinion pages, in a classic bit of how-do-you-do-fellow-kids-ism, even went so far as to declare AI a “mid” technology. Oof.

This phenomenon was real and evolving two weeks ago when we reported on the aforementioned YouGov data, but— true to the velocity of the AI space— it may have already accelerated since. Last week saw a fresh wave of negative AI sentiment bubble up online in reaction to OpenAI’s release of their 4o model’s new image generation ability and users’ subsequent use of it to mimic very specific and beloved artistic styles. It was a crystal clear manifestation of what we posited was a “moral dimension” of AI skepticism— one of several animating forces of negative sentiment that we hypothesized about when we first wrote about AI skepticism.

But that first pass on AI skepticism was just speculation, and YouGov’s public opinion data doesn’t offer much depth in terms of understanding the reasons why people feel as they do about AI. To help fill this gap in knowledge, we partnered with the research platform Genway to conduct an in-depth exploration of people’s sentiment around AI. We interviewed 105 people who have had experience using ChatGPT and led them through AI-moderated interviews designed to explore the underlying reasons for their sentiment about AI, both good and bad.

The results are a fascinating glimpse into a complex reality, where people see both promise and peril in where things are headed. But before we dive into what the interviews revealed, let’s revisit what we speculated to be some of the key dimensions of AI skepticism:

Politically-minded distrust: left-leaning people who associate AI with the newly-rightward leanings of Silicon Valley and hate it by association (this could also be called an anti-billionaire/anti-Tech/anti-VC dimension); people in this bucket don’t dismiss AI’s technological potential— in fact they acknowledge it— and some worry about job loss for humans and the rich getting richer and poor getting poorer from it

An anti- non-deterministic software dimension: folks who cite hallucinations from LLMs and bizarre media outputs (photos, videos, songs, etc.) as evidence that AI is fundamentally flawed as an approach to building useful software; these folks dismiss AI wholesale because they think it’s nothing but smoke and mirrors

A moral dimension: people who are angry that models have been trained without permission from creators, rights holders, etc. and are opposed to using them at all as a result

A fool-me-once dimension: people who think AI is simply the latest hype cycle for VCs and rich people to pump before they dump, having made their money and leaving behind a landscape of unfulfilled promises; while overlapping with politically-minded distrust, this dimension seems distinct to me, and is rooted more in a cold skepticism than a political worldview

Now here’s a scorecard for how well these either showed up or didn’t in the transcripts of these 105 interviews, as graded by Claude: