Article

Long-term trends in the public perception of artificial intelligence

Authors:

Eric HorvitzAuthors Info & Claims

AAAI'17: Proceedings of the Thirty-First AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence

Pages 963 - 969

Published: 04 February 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Analyses of text corpora over time can reveal trends in beliefs, interest, and sentiment about a topic. We focus on views expressed about artificial intelligence (AI) in the New York Times over a 30-year period. General interest, awareness, and discussion about AI has waxed and waned since the field was founded in 1956. We present a set of measures that captures levels of engagement, measures of pessimism and optimism, the prevalence of specific hopes and concerns, and topics that are linked to discussions about AI over decades. We find that discussion of AI has increased sharply since 2009, and that these discussions have been consistently more optimistic than pessimistic. However, when we examine specific concerns, we find that worries of loss of control of AI, ethical concerns for AI, and the negative impact of AI on work have grown in recent years. We also find that hopes for AI in healthcare and education have increased over time.

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cover image Guide Proceedings

AAAI'17: Proceedings of the Thirty-First AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence

February 2017

5106 pages

Program Chairs:
Satinder Singh
University of Michigan
,
Shaul Markovitch
Technion-Israel Institute of Technology

Sponsors

Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
amazon: amazon
Infosys
Facebook: Facebook
IBM: IBM

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AAAI Press

Publication History

Published: 04 February 2017

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Cited By

Xu ABiehl JLee A(2024)Getting it Just Right: Towards Balanced Utility, Privacy, and Equity in Shared Space SensingACM Transactions on Internet of Things10.1145/36484795:2(1-26)Online publication date: 29-Feb-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3648479
Kelley PCornejo CHayes LJin ESedley AThomas KYang YWoodruff AKelley PKapadia A(2023)"There will be less privacy, of course"Proceedings of the Nineteenth USENIX Conference on Usable Privacy and Security10.5555/3632186.3632218(579-603)Online publication date: 7-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3632186.3632218
Jain PFarzan RLee A(2023)Co-Designing with Users the Explanations for a Proactive Auto-Response Messaging AgentProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36042487:MHCI(1-23)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2023
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Ullstein CEngelmann SPapakyriakopoulos OHohendanner MGrossklags J(2022)AI-Competent Individuals and Laypeople Tend to Oppose Facial Analysis AIProceedings of the 2nd ACM Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization10.1145/3551624.3555294(1-12)Online publication date: 6-Oct-2022
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Kapania SSiy OClapper GSP ASambasivan N(2022)”Because AI is 100% right and safe”: User Attitudes and Sources of AI Authority in IndiaProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3517533(1-18)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
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Kelley PYang YHeldreth CMoessner CSedley AKramm ANewman DWoodruff AFourcade MKuipers BLazar SMulligan D(2021)Exciting, Useful, Worrying, Futuristic: Public Perception of Artificial Intelligence in 8 CountriesProceedings of the 2021 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society10.1145/3461702.3462605(627-637)Online publication date: 21-Jul-2021
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Krafft PYoung MKatell MHuang KBugingo GMarkham APowles JWalsh TWashington A(2020)Defining AI in Policy versus PracticeProceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society10.1145/3375627.3375835(72-78)Online publication date: 7-Feb-2020
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Wang X(2019)Using Sentiment Analysis for Comparing Attitudes between Computer Professionals and Laypersons on the Topic of Artificial IntelligenceProceedings of the 2019 3rd International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval10.1145/3342827.3342829(5-8)Online publication date: 28-Jun-2019
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