A new survey has found that nearly 80 percent of Americans think that news articles being written by artificial intelligence will be a bad thing.
Buzzfeed News has already announced that they will use AI technology for some of their content.
In a memo to staff in January, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti said that the company intends to “lead the future of AI-powered content and maximize the creativity of our writers, producers, and creators and our business.”
In a recent survey about AI use, the Monmouth University Polling Institute found that while 72 percent of Americans believe there will be a time when entire news articles will be written by artificial intelligence, 78 percent believe this will be a bad thing.
“AI has started to permeate every facet of life. Most Americans are skeptical that this is a good thing, even though many of them use some form of artificial intelligence on a regular basis already,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute, in the report about their findings.
Six in ten of those surveyed for the poll said they are familiar with ChatGPT, which can write essays and articles based on simple prompts from the user.
The pollsters report that 65 percent say it is very likely that students will use AI programs such as ChatGPT to cheat on their schoolwork.
“Overall, only 1 in 10 (9%) Americans believe computer scientists’ ability to develop AI would do more good than harm to society,” the poll found. “The remainder are divided between saying AI would do equal amounts of harm and good (46%) or that it would actually do more harm to society overall (41%). These results are largely unchanged from Monmouth’s poll in 2015, but public opinion continues to be more pessimistic about AI’s impact than it was a generation ago. When this same question was asked in 1987 by Cambridge Reports/Research International, 20% of Americans said AI would do more good than harm, 29% expected equal amounts of harm and good, and 39% said it would do more harm overall.”
The Monmouth University Poll was conducted from January 26 to 30, 2023 with 805 adults in the United States. The question results in this release have a margin of error of +/- 5.7 percentage points for the full sample.
