Most American adults believe that artificial intelligence produces better work than they do, according to a new poll jointly produced by The Verge, Vox Media’s Insights and Research team and consultancy firm The Circus.
The poll, which gathered responses from over 2,000 U.S. adults, revealed more than 60% of respondents felt, for instance, that AI improved their art. Only 11% believed AI made their art worse. This held true for almost all fields inquired about by the poll. Whether it be storytelling, coding, music generation or email drafting, the majority of people were of the opinion that each endeavor was improved by AI. The only task wherein less than 50% of people said AI improved upon what they could do was essay writing, wherein 45% felt AI produced superior results and 11% believed artificial intelligence fell short.
Despite many respondents agreeing that generative AI tech exceeded their own artistic abilities, the poll found that 43% of people felt companies should ban copying artists and protect the original creators. This finding is significant, since AI produces and modifies art based on artwork data it trains on. If it has no training data to learn from, it cannot function effectively. As such, almost half of respondents wanting to protect human artists despite agreeing that AI can help improve their personal output may indicate that many people care about defending human-first artistry or don’t understand how generative AI functions.
Also on the topic of art, 70% of people felt artists were due compensation when an AI copied their work or cloned their style.
In the same poll, 64% of respondents said they weren’t opposed to production of “sentient” AI. Over half of the Americans polled believe that the technology is destined to become sentient “at some point.”
This poll is far from the first time humans admitted AI may be better suited for some tasks than real people. The CEO of U.K. energy supplier Octopus Energy recently confirmed AI was doing a large chunk of customer service work for the company and was netting better satisfaction ratings from customers in the process.
