> Around one in five people in the US believe that artificial intelligence is already sentient, while around 30 per cent think that artificial general intelligences (AGIs) capable of performing any task a human can are already in existence. Both beliefs are false, suggesting that the general public has a shaky grasp of the current state of AI – but does it matter?
> Jacy Reese Anthis at the Sentience Institute in New York and his colleagues asked a nationally representative sample of 3500 people in the US their perceptions of AI and its sentience. The surveys, carried out in three waves between 2021 and 2023, asked questions like “Do you think any robots/AIs that currently exist are sentient?” and whether it could ever be possible for that technology to reach sentience.
> “We wanted to collect data early to understand how public opinion might shape the future trajectory of AI technologies,” says Anthis.
The findings of the survey were surprising, he says. In 2021, around 18 per cent of respondents said they thought AI or robot systems already in existence were sentient – a number that increased to 20 per cent in 2023, when there were two survey waves. One in 10 people asked in 2023 thought ChatGPT, which launched at the end of 2022, was sentient.
> “I think we perceive mind very readily in computers,” says Anthis. “We see them as social actors.” He also says that some of the belief in AI sentience is down to big tech companies selling their products as imbued with more abilities than the underlying technology may suggest they have. “There’s a lot of hype in this space,” he says. “As companies have started building their brands around things like AGI, they have a real incentive to talk about how powerful their systems are.”
Also, I suspect, but cannot prove, that a lot of the equally hyperbolic hype-pumping “news” articles littering the web about the coming AI revolution are puff pieces paid for out of OpenAI’s marketing budget.
Whether they are OpenAI-funded or not, the press is definitely misinforming the public with unfounded sensationalistic drek.
Are_you_blind_sir on
Anyone who tried to use it for academic purposes or mathematics can already tell you this thing sucks
New_Start2024 on
It’s costing people their livelihoods already.
That will only worsen with time.
This isn’t the town ferrier mad that cars are putting him out of business. This is tens of millions of jobs we’re talking about.
Maybe because we keep calling dumb tech that barely qualifies as a complex RNG device “artificial intelligence”?
The number of people who don’t know that all of these AI will give the exact same answer if their seed values are set to a constant and you keep repeating a question to it is depressing.
Machine gets fed shit ton of data for a given topic, which records specific patterns based on user data, then is given values to generate sentences, images, videos, etc.
Nothing smart there except for the people who coded the really cool tech.
super_sayanything on
Most people don’t even know the meaning of sentient and they don’t care about their responses to these questions when asked.
AppropriateScience71 on
The irony is they’ll be using AI to make their case.
8 Comments
> Around one in five people in the US believe that artificial intelligence is already sentient, while around 30 per cent think that artificial general intelligences (AGIs) capable of performing any task a human can are already in existence. Both beliefs are false, suggesting that the general public has a shaky grasp of the current state of AI – but does it matter?
> Jacy Reese Anthis at the Sentience Institute in New York and his colleagues asked a nationally representative sample of 3500 people in the US their perceptions of AI and its sentience. The surveys, carried out in three waves between 2021 and 2023, asked questions like “Do you think any robots/AIs that currently exist are sentient?” and whether it could ever be possible for that technology to reach sentience.
> “We wanted to collect data early to understand how public opinion might shape the future trajectory of AI technologies,” says Anthis.
The findings of the survey were surprising, he says. In 2021, around 18 per cent of respondents said they thought AI or robot systems already in existence were sentient – a number that increased to 20 per cent in 2023, when there were two survey waves. One in 10 people asked in 2023 thought ChatGPT, which launched at the end of 2022, was sentient.
> “I think we perceive mind very readily in computers,” says Anthis. “We see them as social actors.” He also says that some of the belief in AI sentience is down to big tech companies selling their products as imbued with more abilities than the underlying technology may suggest they have. “There’s a lot of hype in this space,” he says. “As companies have started building their brands around things like AGI, they have a real incentive to talk about how powerful their systems are.”
I blame [The ELIZA Effect](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect) and OpenAI’s hyperbolic overpromising on future ChatGPT capabilities.
Also, I suspect, but cannot prove, that a lot of the equally hyperbolic hype-pumping “news” articles littering the web about the coming AI revolution are puff pieces paid for out of OpenAI’s marketing budget.
Whether they are OpenAI-funded or not, the press is definitely misinforming the public with unfounded sensationalistic drek.
Anyone who tried to use it for academic purposes or mathematics can already tell you this thing sucks
It’s costing people their livelihoods already.
That will only worsen with time.
This isn’t the town ferrier mad that cars are putting him out of business. This is tens of millions of jobs we’re talking about.
1 in 5 five believe this, but also 1 in 4 believe the sun orbits the Earth (or at least they did [10 years ago](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/02/14/277058739/1-in-4-americans-think-the-sun-goes-around-the-earth-survey-says)), so I guess it’s relatively not that bad. 1/3 of Americans completley reject evolution, and 7% thought chocolate milk came from brown cows.
Maybe because we keep calling dumb tech that barely qualifies as a complex RNG device “artificial intelligence”?
The number of people who don’t know that all of these AI will give the exact same answer if their seed values are set to a constant and you keep repeating a question to it is depressing.
Machine gets fed shit ton of data for a given topic, which records specific patterns based on user data, then is given values to generate sentences, images, videos, etc.
Nothing smart there except for the people who coded the really cool tech.
Most people don’t even know the meaning of sentient and they don’t care about their responses to these questions when asked.
The irony is they’ll be using AI to make their case.