Americans still trust humans more than AI

The Ipsos Consumer Tracker, fielded on Ipsos' Omnibus platform, asks Americans questions about culture, the economy and the forces that shape our lives. Here's one thing we learned this week.

Why we asked: We’ve asked a number of questions about AI and trust over the years, often in a “do you trust humans” vs. “do you trust AI” framing. But last year, we added the nuance of “do you trust humans using AI.”

What we found: It’s been a long year of pretty much every conversation in pretty much every context coming back to AI at some point. Most of those conversations center on functionality and trust. 

There is certainly no shortage of industry effort to get us to use and trust these tools more. So you might expect that, year-over-year, we’d see change. Or at least patterns. And you would be incorrect. 

For the most part, trust in AI is unchanged across the wide range of topics we asked about, from reading medical test results to air traffic control to screening job applicants to planning vacation itineraries and more. That doesn’t mean that we trust humans more either. Across the board, we are much more likely to trust humans than AI. We are mostly likely to trust humans getting an AI assist when it comes to low-risk and often creative tasks like making movies or advertising content, or tasks we often like to offload like analyzing business data.