The rapid spread of artificial intelligence has people wondering: who’s most likely to embrace AI in their daily lives? Many assume it’s the tech-savvy – those who understand how AI works – who are most eager to adopt it.
Surprisingly, our new research (published in the Journal of Marketing) finds the opposite. People with less knowledge about AI are actually more open to using the technology. We call this difference in adoption propensity the “lower literacy-higher receptivity” link.
Speaking as a researcher in the AI/ML space, you see an interesting divergence at the upper end of familiarity. Some focus on the rapid recent growth of the technology and are quite enthusiastic about it, but others (myself included) focus much more on its limitations, especially driven by the type/quality of the training data used to make the models. I think it comes from different backgrounds prior to learning the tech. Computer science people tend to be in group one, whereas other scientists (biologists, physicists…) that adopt ML as a tool are more likely to be in group two. To be clear, all of this is my personal experience from personal interactions and literature review in graduate school, not some large scale survey.