How do people feel about AI?
A nationally representative survey of public attitudes to artificial intelligence (AI) in the UK
AI technologies already interact with many aspects of people’s lives, from using facial recognition to unlock mobile phones, to predicting the risk of cancer.
The Ada Lovelace Institute and the Alan Turing Institute have run two waves of a nationally representative survey to understand the public’s awareness and perception of different uses of AI, experiences of harms and expectations for governance. The most recent survey took place in 2024/25.
Nearly three-quarters of the British public say laws and regulation would make them more comfortable with AI, up from 62% in 2023
93% of the public have heard of driverless cars, compared to 18% who are aware of the use of AI for welfare eligibility assessment
Large language models (LLMs) have gone mainstream with nearly two-thirds of the public saying they have heard of LLMs and 40% saying they have used them. This demonstrates rapid adoption since their release in 2022