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U.S. adults are far more wary of AI’s expanding role in daily life than surveyed AI experts are. In Pew Research Center’s 2024 surveys, 51% of adults said they were more concerned than excited about that increased use, compared with 15% of surveyed AI experts. The gap helps explain why the AI industry’s public image looks badly fumbled—but these polls measure opinion, not what caused it.
How wide is the public–expert gap?
Pew Research Center surveyed 5,410 U.S. adults from Aug. 12–18, 2024, and 1,013 U.S.-based AI experts from Aug. 14–Oct. 31, 2024. The adult sample came from Pew’s American Trends Panel. Experts were sampled from authors and presenters at 21 AI-related conferences held in 2023 or 2024; their responses were unweighted. The groups were not sampled in the same way, and the expert results describe those respondents rather than every AI professional.
| View | U.S. adults | Surveyed AI experts |
|---|---|---|
| More concerned than excited about AI’s increased use in daily life | 51% | 15% |
| More excited than concerned | 11% | 47% |
| Very or extremely concerned about AI-related job loss | 56% | 25% |
| Highly concerned about bias in AI decisions | 55% | 55% |
Pew’s comparison shows that the divide is not simply a blanket rejection of technology: adults and experts reported the same high level of concern about bias in AI decisions, while views on daily use and job loss diverged sharply.
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Jobs and the value of human work
Job-loss anxiety is one of the clearest divides in Pew’s U.S. comparison: 56% of adults were very or extremely concerned about AI-related job loss, versus 25% of surveyed experts. That is a difference in concern, not a forecast of how many jobs AI will eliminate. It does show why broad assurances about AI’s potential benefits may not answer the question people are asking about their own livelihoods.
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Accuracy, impersonation, and data misuse
Pew’s reporting also describes public worries about inaccurate information, impersonation, and misuse of personal data. These concerns reach beyond whether a tool is convenient. If people cannot tell what is genuine, who produced a message, or how their information will be used, confidence in AI-powered services becomes harder to earn.
Thinking and relationships
In a separate survey of 5,023 U.S. adults conducted June 9–15, 2025, 53% said AI would worsen people’s ability to think creatively, while 16% said it would improve that ability. For the ability to form meaningful relationships, 50% expected AI to make it worse and 5% expected it to make it better. These are expectations about AI’s effects, not measurements showing that those abilities have already changed.
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The same 2025 survey found that 50% of adults were more concerned than excited about AI’s increased use in daily life, compared with 37% in 2021; 10% were more excited than concerned in 2025. This suggests concern has persisted across several years of U.S. polling, though a survey trend by itself does not explain why.
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Is this concern unique to the United States?
No, but attitudes differ substantially by country. Pew’s 2025 international analysis drew on 28,333 adults in 25 countries surveyed from Jan. 8 to Apr. 26, 2025; its U.S. attitude data came from a separate June survey. Across the 25 non-U.S. countries, the median share was 34% more concerned than excited about AI, 42% equally concerned and excited, and 16% more excited than concerned. These are country medians, not a pooled estimate for the world’s population, and some countries showed much higher concern than others.
Pew’s country-by-country findings support a broad picture of mixed and often cautious opinion, not one uniform global verdict.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.People are more comfortable with AI assistance than full automation in news
Attitudes can depend on what AI is asked to do and whether a person remains responsible for the result. In a YouGov online survey fielded June 5–July 15, 2025, across Argentina, Denmark, France, Japan, the UK, and the U.S., respondents reported different levels of comfort with AI’s role in news:
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|---|---|
| Entirely human-made | 62% |
| Human-led, with some AI assistance | 43% |
| AI-made, with a human in the loop | 21% |
| Entirely AI-made | 12% |
Respondents also showed more comfort with spelling and grammar editing (55%) and translation (53%) than with creating realistic images when no photo exists (26%) or using artificial presenters or authors (19%). These results are specific to generative AI in news across six countries; they should not be treated as a measure of every AI application. Within this context, however, the pattern suggests that people care about both the task and the human role in producing the output. See the Reuters Institute’s 2025 report on generative AI and news and its overview of the 2025 Digital News Report.
Environmental concerns are part of the debate
An Associated Press report on an AP-NORC and University of Chicago poll conducted in September 2025 described concerns about AI’s environmental impact. It quoted Aidan Collins, a 26-year-old Democrat in New York, saying: “Using all this energy and contributing to climate change in a bad way, it all just seems very awful to me.” That is one respondent’s view, not a poll-wide result; the report does not provide a response percentage for this concern in the cited passage. The Associated Press report adds environmental impact as a reported public concern without establishing how widespread it is.
What does “fumbled public image” mean here?
The survey evidence makes “fumbled” a defensible interpretation of a trust and expectation problem: the public is more concerned than surveyed experts about AI’s daily use and job effects, and many respondents anticipate harms to human abilities. Yet the polls do not identify a single cause, prove that industry messaging produced these attitudes, or establish that every AI company has the same reputation. They show a substantial distance between what many people fear and the optimism experts express—not a verdict on every organization or use of AI.
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