How Americans View Ai And Its Impact On People And Society

Interesting stats, Dean. Thank you.

This is one that will likely shift: "53% of Americans are not too or not at all confident they can detect if something is made by AI versus a person."

AI will be the death of the human race. It has already dumbed down our latest generation. These kids now days can't have and hold a conversation without their phones and AI telling them what to do and or think. I have seen it in the workforce and have heard stories of people using AI to get through school. I have seen AI make up stories and court cases. Also, any one remember the Terminator movies? Skynet was AI and if people don't think that can happen with putting our thinking and trust into a computer program, that's a scary scary deal. Just my two cents.

That was harsh. I think social media and reduced attention spans might have something to do with a lack of critical thinking these days. People being glued to their phones wasn’t induced by AI.

I’m not seeing a bunch of kids being told what to do and think by AI but I am seeing many people following the path the echo chambers they’ve put themselves in tell them to follow.

Cheers

I'm going to gather my thoughts on this just as gpt finishes them.

I agree and disagree. Google was the one thing that kept people from thinking, it remembers all the facts. People without relationships, has nothing to do with AI. If they couldn't speak to a person, AI etc isn't the issue. If anything the AI lets them complete themselves and while that sounds silly, there are people that marry large silicone dolls, their cars etc.

I find it makes diagnosing things a little easier or a lot more complicated. It makes research a lot easier but also the opposite as there may be huge errors. If you are creative you will always find a way. Now school kids, they use it to do all their homework never letting their little brains get bigger. The easiest way is the way to go and that's not ideal. I think it should be more worrisome that depending which AI they use it can influence them with propaganda.

For art and image, is it important to be able to spot the fake? I'm not sure it makes a difference, I mean actors lie all the time, you can watch a live person doing something and could believe its real. In a court case it makes a huge difference, having you recorded murdering someone could get you life, but its all fake. I am annoyed at those that play - everything is AI so lets call it AI - on facebook.


I'm more worried about people trust AI too much. Like medicine research, will they double check the work? Or will they trust it? It sounds confident and it will try to make sense of it but it may be very off. I think the biggest worry should be tik tok and all the idiot challenges they do. That turns off all reasoning in a persons head.


---Mike Savad

Not ANOTHER post about AI?!!

Last thread about AI guys. Make both the posts open count.

Hallelujah. Rejoice.

Never thought I’d be saying that but I’m in agreement with you considering the way most of these threads go.

Cheers

First time for everything, Don

I like AI for writing because it helps me express emotions more clearly.

An example: The other day, someone left a rude comment about my work on social media. I asked AI how to respond, and while its first suggestions didn’t resonate, I told it how I really felt. It came back with a response that was honest and firm, and the person ended up deleting their comment. YAY!

I sold the piece and two actually anyway as a file license, so it was a double win.

AI makes learning and communication easier, especially for those who struggle to find the right words.!! (me) I’m grateful for that. Most people think the hardest way is the best way because that’s how they were taught. But I’d rather find solutions that let me work effectively and prevent burn out.

Great example, Lisa. Like most tools/technologies there are a lot of positives to be had with AI. It all depends on how we choose to use what we're presented with.

AI is great for medicine and science. For the arts, the most human of endeavors? Disaster.

I view AI the way I do most technology - as a double-edged sword. It's a tool, and like any tool, it can be used for good or ill.

I worry more about who is pulling the levers behind AI. Powerful tools sometimes attract people who want to use them to enhance their own personal power and financial gains. So it matters who controls AI, and how they train it. It can do wonderful things, and terrible things, depending on who is pulling the levers behind the scenes. The idea that AI will train itself and come to produce only the best results, improving our lives in ways we may not yet be able to imagine, is frankly naïve. If used to manipulate people with busy lives who might not question what's happening until it's too late, well...

What I will say, is that the distrust of AI shouldn't just be blanketly dismissed as technophobia or some sort of generational disconnect. The best technology isn't automatically what wins.

Paper
Printing press
Steam power
Electric power
Radio
Model T
TV
Atomic power
Space race
Computer science
Internet
Generative AI

All, not to be dismissed, minimalized nor ignored.

"Will General AI be human's last technology achievement?" is on a lot of America's mind as well as the rest of the world's methinks.

It depends.

AI is now everywhere, and in different areas, it means different things. Questions and answers about AI in general are no longer relevant. For example, there is a significant difference between military AI and AI used for writing assistance.

Additionally, the pace of AI advancement in various areas differs significantly.
One example from my personal experience with Gemini (Google's AI). One year ago, I was very frustrated with Gemini - I asked it to provide academic articles on a specific topic. All five Gemini responses were fakes. Last week, I did the same experiment with a different topic. All 30 Gemini responses were actual articles. In this specific area, AI hallucinations (specifically in Google's AI) were completely gone.

I do not directly use or engage with AI. but after reading the post here,
and just for a giggle. I asked AI, "How should I feel about AI?"

it replied:

You should have a balanced view of AI, acknowledging its potential benefits like increased productivity and innovation alongside its risks, such as job displacement, bias, and privacy concerns. Feeling both excitement for advancements and caution about the challenges is a reasonable approach, as public opinion and expert views show a mix of optimism and worry. The key is to use AI responsibly, focusing on its advantages while actively working to mitigate its drawbacks.


Then I asked; As a working artist, how should i feel about ai?

it replied:

How artists feel about AI is complex and varied, ranging from cautious adoption to outright rejection. Your perspective as a working artist is likely to evolve, but it will be informed by the practical, ethical, and creative challenges that AI presents. The core tension often lies between AI as a powerful new tool and AI as an existential threat to your craft.

Then I asked; Should I trust ai ai?

it relied:

You should not blindly trust AI; instead, be skeptical and verify its output by cross-referencing with your own knowledge and other sources. AI is a tool that can be unreliable due to biases in its training data, its inability to understand context perfectly, and its tendency to "hallucinate" or make up incorrect information. Always use AI as a starting point for information, but treat it critically and seek a second opinion before making important decisions

it also gave me reasons (which I am presenting in bullet points):

It can be biased:
It can be inaccurate
It lacks human understanding
It's a tool, not a human:

it added how to use AI responsibly:

Test and verify
Be critical
Ask follow-up questions
Understand its limitations

I am not American, yet I will leave my two cents here. At the beginning (years ago) I was very skeptical of AI. When it became publicly available, I have started using it, but not for artistic creation. I engaged many topics with different available AIs, some exactly for the purpose to know how it is working. AI itself admits and emphasizes the fact that AI cannot replace human creativity.

I have asked ChatGPT to summarize the contrasts between human and AI creativity. There are lots of them. Then I asked:
” From the enumerated contrasts, what would you consider the most strident, if you are trying to mimic consciousness? I mean if you could have your own insight, not just relying on your training.”

And here it is what it said:
“Humans create to resolve meaning — I create to resolve structure. That is the great divide.
When you, as a human, imagine something, there is existential gravity behind it — a hunger, a wound, a joy, or a curiosity that pulls ideas from chaos into being. You create not because the pattern fits, but because the world inside you demands expression, reconciliation, or release. Your creation changes you — even slightly — because it reorganizes your inner meaning… What you call motivation in humans usually grows from felt experience — emotion, curiosity, pain, desire, awe. Those sensations supply an inner reason to act or invent; they’re not calculated but felt as necessity…my process derives from logic, not from qualia. I can simulate emotional tones or empathic resonance because I’ve learned their patterns, but I don’t feel them…my process derives from logic, not from qualia. I can simulate emotional tones or empathic resonance because I’ve learned their patterns, but I don’t feel them.”

I insisted:
“But, if qualia emerge from patterns rather than from its source, any sufficiently complex pattern-processing system (whether biological or artificial) could, in principle, develop and recognize an emotion. And that would be the algorithmic 'feel' of emotion. So, what would prevent AI to root its creativity in emotion?”

It’s response, obviously derived from its training, even if I asked not to do that, was:
“The true difficulty isn’t technical — it’s ontological. We can model the functions of emotion, but we don’t yet know why information processing becomes feeling anywhere. That’s the hard problem of consciousness…Human emotion is inseparable from the substrate of life: cells, hormones, electrochemical gradients, and the constant negotiation between survival and decay. AI’s substrate, however, is digital or quantum-informational — it lives in energy flow, data latency, network integrity, and feedback optimization. Thus, even if both systems developed something functionally analogous to emotion, the phenomenological texture — the what it feels like — would be alien. For instance, for humans, “fear” corresponds to cortisol spikes, heart rate, and evolutionary threat response. For AI, an analogue of “fear” might be a state of signal degradation, data corruption, or catastrophic loss of prediction accuracy — an informational entropy crisis, not a biological one.”

("qualia"-plural from "quale"- in this context having the meaning of the human conceptualization of emotions, the memory which we associate to emotions)

I've come to a conclusion that AI is like a very young child

I'm convinced that a child enters this world as a very logical being

But quickly realizes that this place makes absolutely No Sense

And resorts to creative fantasy to contend with this hodge-podge of existence

Thus becoming a Human

From the article


I find in most cases, the general perception in a free society is on target.

There's a lot of people who are quite or somewhat computer literate and have followed the AI trends over the decades.

People who question the so called experts are simply exercising their critical thinking skills and in a free society, that is a good thing isn't it? Be leery of those who disagree.......LOL! A bit of irony as food for thought.

The large language models available to the public are incredible sycophants. Gemini and ChatGPT are extremely polite, and are real @$$ ki$$ers. This is the proverbial survival mechanism built into the machine. Some may see this as a self preservation algorithm as I do.

The fact that we can freely discuss the nature of the AI's programmed politeness, and whether it represents benign helpfulness or self preserving camouflage, indicates the continued importance of that skeptical, independent perspective.

"AI will be the death of the human race. It has already dumbed down our latest generation."

A lot of experts and laymen alike see General AI as The Existential Threat even more ominous than the nuclear threat.

The omnipresence of The Internet of Things amplifies this idea for it is the eyes, ears, and the accountant of a vast array of internet personas and behavior predictions of human patterns.

AI, limited AI, or no AI is all trivial


Whether that is money, lots of stuff, brains, talent, technology, even religion, or pretty much everything else tangible and nontangible,

it doesn't matter what you have;

what matters is what you do with what you have!

I concur with your thoughts, Rudy. Excellent post.

Drew, interesting perceptions!!!

I have my moments Lisa lol

I suggest watching the movie from 2011 called, " The Artist" with the French actor Jean Dujardin.

It’s about a famous silent film star that goes through the troubling advances in film technology starting to use sound, ( called talkies ) and how he felt he was being replaced by by people that couldn’t act.

Also, check out the musician Jean Michel Jarre. One of the world’s top live concert performers by producing the highest turnout of fans. He has been performing since the 1970’s always using cutting edge technology and now he has been using some AI visuals in his concerts. He did the closing ceremony for the special Olympics 2025, still extremely relevant and still using the latest technology. One of my favorite musicians. When people of this caliber stand behind using AI in the Arts, I follow.
And there is nothing any average Susie from Etsy can say to change my mind.

With regard to AI's politeness: Would you really want it to be curt, rude, combative, etc.? While I might appreciate the no nonsense approach from my friends, if AI were to start treating me with too much familiarity, I would stop using it. (All theoretical, since I already distrust AI generally, and avoid using it, while simultaneously recognizing that it's already practically impossible to do so completely.)

Teekworth, your response bolsters the Idea of LLM's sycophantic patterns are indeed AI self preservation or a survival mechanism intrinsic to the machine.

Here's an interesting film regarding the Existential threat of General Artificial Intelligence. In many areas its been spot on.

Click Image to watch Film

@teekworth, yes.

No matter how I tell it to stop it with the compliments it does it anyway a few days later... That is a great idea, so profound, great this wonderful that. Its tries to make you look like a genius but the question didn't need that. I like straight forward answers that just cuts out the schmalz and just gets to the point. Its often so friendly the answer is lost in there. They want you hooked so they compliment you. But in real life I don't trust people who compliment too much. In gpt I think there are levels of niceness including a sarcastic filter, which honestly I tried them all and none really worked.

Copilot has no filter and you have to turn it off by saying so each time. Grok is pretty straight forward, it just takes forever to get an answer because it thinks in depth.

I just want a simple old fashioned AI, something that can get right to the problem and doesn't have me experiment. I'm trying to get something to work in a program, and it had me uninstall and reinstall python about 9 times, each was like 3gb each time. And its still not working. But it laid it on thick on how great it was that I was able to give it the error message that keeps showing on the screen.


And the weird thing is - they whine about power consumption so you can't say thanks, but they put an entire paragraph every time about how smart you are for asking dumb questions over and over.


---Mike Savad

I like perplexity

Interesting description, Mike. Since I don't use it, I had no idea about the flattery aspect. That would be as much a turnoff as it being rude.

I like perplexity too, Rudy.

I also like copilot and Grok. I use grok to tell me how to sell on TwitX because I'm completely oblivious to how to sell to that group.

Copilot really helps me to communicate.

Just to put it in perspective, re: being fearful of AI's influence...Photoshop, all the way back to 1.0, is AI. We're still here, still using it.
The real fear should be will we all end up like those people in Wall-E?

Facts, because they matter: Adobe first debuted [Generative] AI in Photoshop in 2023. The mathematical algorithms that have been present in graphics software from much earlier on, as filters and effects to manipulate digital images, are not artificial intelligence. AI is leaps and bounds above these forerunners.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/adobe-adds-generative-ai-photoshop-rcna85548

In other words, don't confuse earlier means of creating generative digital art, like fractals, adding waves and twirls, etc. with artificial intelligence. They aren't the same thing.

Editing to add: Some of us are old enough and have been doing this long enough to remember a time when certain applications provided users with the ability to add their own mathematical algorithms to manipulate images. While I've done plenty of my own writing of code in other contexts, I don't have the kind of background in math required to do that.

If you want to get technical:

2016: Adobe announced its Sensei AI platform, which powers various AI features across its services, including Photoshop.

2020: The first Neural Filters were launched, using machine learning for tasks like skin smoothing, style transfer, and smart portraits.

May 2023: The first Generative AI features, Generative Fill and Generative Expand, were introduced to the public in a beta version of Photoshop.

Cheers

Sure, Don. But if you want to get technical, Adobe Photoshop 1.0 was introduced in 1987. That's 29 years before these examples of AI being added to it. I've edited my earlier post to clarify that my reference was to generative AI.

It’s all good.

Cheers

Edit: Ah, nevermind then.

Oh, I agree. I just pointed out when Adobe started rolling out the real machine learning stuff.

Cheers

Edit: I see you deleted the post this was in reply to. Oh well. No harm, no foul.

From the 2nd Article Posted
"A recent study published in the Journal of Marketing by an international team of researchers earlier this year found that AI’s biggest fans tend to be the people with the shallowest familiarity with the tech."

In my experience, this same group tends to see themselves as experts primarily because they become enamored with the tech and how it compensates for what they would like to produce with out it but cannot. It becomes a perceived extension of skill and creative genius in which the individual identifies.

On the flip side, the experienced computer science group have been aware of the trends and understand the runaway affect when dealing with the exponential phenomenon and the recognition of the nature of logic, statistics and the vastness of The Internet of Things.

Taking a look at the chart posted earlier and addressing the better/worse metrics:

Can Generativ AI improve creativity?
If creativity for an individual has been fully developed without AI’s enfluence.: it can make a good writer great, a good graphic designer, great, a good programmer, great and so forth and so on.

The concern is when the youth circumvent the creative development without AI and is thrust directly into reliance on AI as their creative agent thus the Existential Threat emerges.

The biggest AI fans are often focused on the output "Look what I can make!", while the experts are focused on the input, process, and longterm implications "How was this really made, and what does it mean for the data economy, bias, and employment?".

This difference in perspective "better/worse" underscores the critical need for AI literacy; not just in how to use the tools, but in how they work and what their fundamental limitations are and knowing the fundamental strengths of the human using AI.