Specific benefits and concerns around different AI uses

To further understand how people view the possible benefits and concerns surrounding different uses of AI, we asked respondents to select specific ways they believe each technology to be beneficial and concerning from multiple choice lists.

The benefits and concerns included in each list were created to reflect common themes, such as speed and accuracy, bias and accountability, though each list was specific to each technology (see full survey for all benefits and concerns listed for each technology). Participants could select as many statements from each list as they felt applied, with ​‘something else’, ​‘none of the above’, and ​‘don’t know’ options also given for each.

Overall, people most commonly identify benefits related to speed, efficiency and accessibility, and most commonly express concerns related to overreliance on technologies over professional human judgement, being unable to account for personal circumstances, and a lack of transparency and accountability in decision-making processes. However, the specific benefits and concerns most commonly selected vary across technologies.

The following sections describe the specific benefits and concerns that people chose for each AI use. We cluster these by categories of technologies for risk and eligibility assessments, facial recognition technologies, robotics, virtual assistants, targeted online advertising, and simulations for science and education.

Tables 1–12 (in the following sections) show the three most commonly chosen benefits and concerns for each technology. A full list of benefits and concerns presented to participants and the percentage of people selecting each can be found in the Appendix🔗.