Only 16 percent of Americans think AI will have a positive impact on society, a new study shows

Despite the fact that AI increasingly dominates our economy (it’s a hot IPO summer and we’re all just along for the ride), most Americans are not particularly optimistic about the technology’s long-term impact on the country, a new study from Pew Research reveals.

In fact, although a whole lot of Americans increasingly use AI in their daily lives, most of them have neutral to negative views about it, the research reveals.

Only 16% of Americans think that AI’s impact on society during the next 20 years will be positive, Pew says, while around 40% say that it will have a negative impact.

A vast majority of people (67%) don’t believe that the U.S. government will do anything to meaningfully regulate AI. A similarly skeptical cohort (59%) don’t trust companies to develop it safely.

Young people — that is, those people under 30 — are the ones with the most negative feelings about AI. Pew says that only 14% of this cohort believe the tech will have a positive impact on society.

On top of all this, a vast majority of Americans — nearly two-thirds — also think that AI’s development is occurring too quickly.

Despite all of the skepticism, a whole lot of Americans also report using AI in their daily lives on an increasingly regular basis. About a quarter of Americans say they use AI chatbots on a daily basis. Those who do are typically using the chatbots for research purposes or for work, Pew says.

A vast majority of people using AI are using ChatGPT. Pew writes that 44% of U.S. adults now say they use OpenAI’s chatbot, a figure that’s more than doubled since 2023.

The next most popular chatbot is Gemini (24%), followed by Copilot (17%) and Meta AI (14%), with Grok (8%), Claude (6%), and Character.ai (3%) lagging behind.

There is a bit of a gender divide. While chatbot use is growing for both men and women, men still use AI more and are more enthusiastic about it, while women are more skeptical, Pew says. Men are more likely to say they use AI chatbots in their daily lives (27% versus 20% for women) and while equal shares of men and women report using ChatGPT, men more commonly report usage of other brands, such as Copilot and Grok.

The report also highlights how AI is changing the ways Americans consume information. Six in 10 survey respondents told Pew that they routinely read AI-generated internet summaries (indeed, on Google, they’re pretty much unavoidable). A much smaller number report using AI to get information on fitness and dieting.

There are also still a whole lot of people — about half of the country — that say they do not use AI in their daily lives. The people who do not use AI tend to be older, while those under 50 are more likely to say that they use it. Nearly 75% of Americans aged 65 or older say that they never use AI chatbots.

Those people who don’t use chatbots say they don’t because they’re not interested in them, and add that they have no intention of using them in the future.