People don’t trust AI tools, but use them anyway

The Ipsos Consumer Tracker 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: An Ipsos tech client recently asked us to present on the American Dream issue of What the Future and the Ipsos Global AI Monitor. One of the themes that carried across both topics was trust. The client raised some interesting questions, so we’re fielding them here.

What we found: Trust is often seen as the be-all-end-all in a lot of contexts we care about, like brand/customer relationships and also tech adoption issues. At the same time, we see diminished trust in so many spheres of our reality, like trust in leaders and institutions. It’s a pretty big recalibration to have a conversation about “does trust matter.” It might be time to entertain that idea.

Two in three people who use AI say that they don’t trust AI tools — but use them anyway. Only 29% say they don’t check the AI’s work because they trust it. Despite that, 53% say they like using AI tools at work and 73% like using them for personal tasks. That jibes with new usage data from OpenAI as does the narrowing gap between male and female users.

In a separate question, people who are familiar with AI trust it most for its speed. 89% of people trust AI to be fast (48% trust it a lot!). But overall, most people familiar with the technology trust AI to be consistent, unbiased, accurate and consistent. 

The main place we start to lose trust in AI is in terms of privacy, and this may be the heart of the fatalistic “I use it anyway” sentiment. Also worth noting is a little bit of trust fall-off with younger Americans, who are usually the most technophilic age cohort. Is that because they’re using these tools more and see the flaws more? Possibly. 

Now half of Americans who are familiar with AI (49%) report having used AI chatbots in the past month. That’s a huge jump from when we last asked, which admittedly was a while ago in March of 2023. Image generation use has also jumped to 39%. And a majority (58%) are now using it for search. Younger Americans do report using AI tools at a higher rate than the 35- to 54-year-olds, though they are even in their use of AI search. The younger cohort are 10 points less likely to have used non-AI internet search (82% vs 92%) which is a finding to keep an eye on.

So there’s still a lot of upside in the adoption curves. Is trust in privacy the thing holding others back from using AI? Is it ease of use (older Americans 55+ report much lower usage numbers)? Is it just a lack of reasons to use it, for some?

However, one way to build trust in AI is to keep the humans involved. Read more about that in our latest Insights to Activate, Bridging the AI Divide.