Love, drugs, and rock and roll are (mostly) dead. In 2023, our cultural zeitgeist is A.I., Ozempic, and the economy. And, just like rock and roll, A.I. provokes a range of emotions from people of various demographics.
A new report on U.S. consumer trends by Dan Frommer, the author of The New Consumer newsletter and podcast, digs into some of these generational differences in attitudes at a time when technology is redefining how we think about things like work, entertainment, and healthcare.
Roughly half of Gen Z and Millennials believe that A.I. creations—for example, an image generated by a tool like DALL-E or Midjourney based on prompts provided by a human—can be considered art. For “Boomers,” those between 63 and 82 years of age, only 17% hold that same view.
And more than two out of three the Gen Z and Millennials surveyed think this A.I. art will soon become the norm, superseding anything produced by the human hand.
“41% of Gen Z and millennials at least ‘somewhat agree’ that 20 years from now, most movies, art, music and books will be created by AI, and almost 40% somewhat agree that the best media will be created by AI within 20 years,” Frommer said at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Deer Valley, Utah last week in the first presentation of the report.
The report, titled “AI, Ozempic and the Economy: The Three Things That Matter Right Now,” uses various samples, ranging from 1,300 people at a time to more than 2,700. The full 102-slide presentation, released on Wednesday, explores views about some of the latest advances in technology and health, including the popularity of weight-loss drugs.
Tech firms like Google, Meta, and Microsoft have been developing A.I. for years, with the technology powering everything from facial recognition and foreign language translation to the spell checker and autocomplete features in email. The November release of OpenAI’s text-generation tool ChatGPT however has supercharged public interest in artificial intelligence and led to a wave of new A.I. tools launched by startups. The profusion of generative A.I. tools has also sparked discussions about potential existential threats to humanity if A.I. were somehow to become too powerful to be controlled, as well as concerns about near-term problems like privacy issues from A.I. tools and bias in the technology.
While the younger generations believe the spread of A.I. is inevitable, this outlook is tinged with ambivalence. 34% of Gen Z and Millennials described themselves as “excited” and “hopeful” about A.I. even though 31% described themselves as “worried.”
By contrast, Gen X and Boomers are overwhelmingly uneasy about the A.I. future, with 53% of respondents in those cohorts describing themselves as “worried,” and only 17% as “excited.”
Among the key A.I. concerns among all respondents is the spread of misinformation and the erosion of trust in what we see or hear, with more than half citing a “total lack of trust in visual and/or audio content” as being extremely or very likely to occur within the next 20 years.
Mass unemployment, increased income and social inequality are also big concerns. 28% of U.S. workers say they are worried A.I. will replace them at work within five years.
The highest-paid workers currently say they use A.I. the most of any group, with 63% of respondents who earn more than $200,000 saying they currently use A.I. at work, whereas only 29% of workers who make between $25,000 and $50,000 a year report that they currently use A.I. on the job.
Despite the anxiety about A.I. replacing human jobs, only a small percentage of people—13% or less—would trust an A.I. to be their doctor, lawyer or assistant, according to the report. But the more someone says they know about A.I., the more willing they would be to trust an A.I. doctor. Only 5% of people who describe themselves as “somewhat familiar” with A.I. say they would trust an A.I. doctor. Among the crowd who deem themselves “extremely familiar” with A.I., 34% say they would trust a diagnosis from an A.I. more than from a human doctor.
