The rapid spread of artificial intelligence has people wondering: who’s most likely to embrace AI in their daily lives? Many assume it’s the tech-savvy – those who understand how AI works – who are most eager to adopt it.
Surprisingly, our new research (published in the Journal of Marketing) finds the opposite. People with less knowledge about AI are actually more open to using the technology. We call this difference in adoption propensity the “lower literacy-higher receptivity” link.
That tracks for sure. The most enthusiastic guys at work also happen to be the ones who put in the least actual work. Sure, it has some uses… but the things it gets wrong are significant enough that no sane individual should rely on anything that AI is involved with making/running. The intelligence part just isn’t there yet. People are effectively getting wowed by a glorified ELIZA chat bot.
The fundamental use-cases for AI are almost never customer oriented, either. You don’t see these tools deployed to reduce wait times or improve authentication or approve access, because the people who deploy them don’t actually trust them to do positive scope client interactions. What you see them doing is robo-calls, front-line customer service, claims denials, and (in the bleakest use cases) military targeting operations. Instances where efficiencies of scale accrue to the operator and an error/problems rebounds to the target of the service rather than the vendor.
An ELIZA chatbot that double-processes your credit card and then keeps denying you a refund when you manually catch and report it.