A lot of people are worried about AI. What are their worries? How worried are they?  Are some demographics more worried than others? We ran a study to find out. 

In this article, we explain 16 concerns about AI that you might find it valuable to know about. We discuss, based on our data (collected in October 2025), how worried people in the US are about each concern.

To whet your appetite, here are some questions that our study offers insights into. Can you predict what we found before we tell you the answers?
 

• Are conservatives more, less, or equally likely to be concerned about AI than progressives?
• What about gender - are men or women more likely to be concerned?
• Does AI-related knowledge affect how concerned people are?
• What are people most concerned about when it comes to AI?
• How low or high is the general level of concern about AI in the US population?
   

Have you made your predictions? Okay, let’s get into the study.

How we studied AI concern

We started by scouring the internet for expressions of concern about AI and compiling a list of common concerns, based on what we found (as well as our own background experience of hearing people express concerns). The potential concerns about AI that we identified are:

1. Proliferation of low-quality AI content (i.e., ‘AI slop’)
2. AIs plagiarising the work of humans (e.g., remixing the work of artists without compensation)
3. AI elimination of jobs
4. AI misinformation (including deepfakes)
5. People using AI but pretending not to have (e.g., to write school assignments)
6. AI used for authoritarian control (e.g., for monitoring and punishing populations based on behavior)
7. Relationships (often romantic) people have with AIs
8. Inequality caused by AI (such as by creating concentration of wealth)
9. AI ideological bias (e.g., favoritism toward progressive or conservative viewpoints)
10. AI bias and discrimination (e.g., by perpetuating unfair unequal treatment of different groups)
11. Concentration of power caused by AI (e.g., making those who control the most advanced AIs much more powerful than everyone else)
12. AI used for scams or to manipulate individuals (e.g., AI bots designed to seem like specific humans in order to trick people)
13. Ceding of more and more control to AIs (e.g., making major decisions impacting millions of people that humans no longer make)
14. Slaughterbots (i.e., weaponized AI drones)
15. Superintelligence (i.e., AI that outperforms the ability of humans in essentially all domains)
16. AI itself experiencing suffering when we train or run it.

Each of these concerns is described and explored in more detail below.

Each of these concerns is described and explored in more detail below.

While we were conducting this experiment (in October of 2025), some other concerns became more prevalent in discourse about AI, but these were not included in our study. The most notable of these that weren't included in our study are:

• The possibility that the monetary values of companies related to generative AI represent a ‘bubble’ that, upon bursting, will have disastrous consequences on the economy of the US or the world
• The negative impacts of AI data centers on local communities (e.g., pollution, use of ground water)
• The environmental impacts of AI, via the energy or water consumption of data centers
• Children having increased access to inappropriate content

We recruited 403 participants through our participant recruitment platform, Positly.com, and started by asking them some general questions about their level of knowledge on the topic of AI and their overall concerns about its impact on their lives and society. After that, we showed them information about the 16 potential AI-related concerns we identified (one potential concern at a time, in a random order). For this, we assigned each participant randomly to one of two groups:

1. Short Definitions: 200 participants were shown just a short sentence defining each of the 16 concerns
2. Full Descriptions: 203 participants were shown the same short sentence definitions as the Short Definitions group and a longer description of each concern, containing examples. (We’ve included all of the full descriptions in this article, below.)

For each potential concern, participants were asked to indicate their level of actual concern about it on a 5-point Likert scale from “Not at all concerned” (which was assigned the value 0) to “Extremely concerned” (which was assigned the value 4).

Finally, at the end of the study, participants were asked again about their general levels of concern about AI (in their own lives and for society), to see whether participating in the study and seeing information about so many potential concerns changed their level of concern, and then they were asked some demographic questions.

Now, let’s dive into the results! We'll start with results about overall concern (before diving into the  16 specific concerns). 

Since this is a long report, we've included just the initial section here. To read the full report, go here: https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/study-report-what-concerns-people-about-ai