The legal battle between two of the most powerful men in Silicon Valley heated up this week, with OpenAI calling Elon Musk’s legal claims against it “convoluted” and “incoherent.” Both sides make lofty claims about protecting humanity’s best interests, with Musk saying the secrecy in which OpenAI develops its powerful ChatGPT model masks a greedy recklessness, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman saying their business model protects the public from bad actors using their powerful tools to nefarious ends. But humanity itself has been a bit distracted by more quotidian problems with AI, according to new polling from the Artificial Intelligence Policy Institute. When we say they might not be following this legal fracas closely, we mean it: 60 percent of the 1,014 web panel respondents surveyed on March 10 said they’ve heard “nothing at all” about the Musk-OpenAI lawsuit. That isn’t to say, however, that they don’t have any thoughts about the ultimate outcome if you take Musk and Altman’s arguments at face value. A few key takeaways: Americans want collaboration, but within limits. When asked whether “Providing access to AI models to academic researchers” was “good or bad for humanity,” 71 percent of respondents said it was “good.” On the other hand, when prompted in the same way about “Open sourcing powerful AI models so it’s easier for more developers to use and alter powerful AI models without restrictions,” 74 percent said it was “bad.” And when asked whether it’s more important that OpenAI democratize the market by releasing its models as “open source” or that they don’t release them until “proven safe,” only 16 percent responded in favor of the former. To extrapolate from the question posed here, Americans clearly blanch at the idea of completely unrestricted, unsupervised AI development and collaboration. As we noted yesterday, however, it’s rarely as simple as “open” and “closed.” Open source AI repositories like HuggingFace have been an invaluable tool to the AI research community, especially for those without the means or access to partner directly with larger, closed AI shops, but they’ve also proved undeniably, worryingly vulnerable to cyberattacks. As elections draw nearer, Americans are more worried about deepfakes. Respondents are expending a fair amount of energy trying to navigate the increasingly AI-driven media environment, with nearly 48 percent saying they “have more trouble identifying which photos are real” since the arrival of powerful generative AI systems, compared to only 20 percent who do not. A combined 85 percent said they were “very” or “somewhat” concerned that AI will make it more difficult to believe the veracity of real photos or videos. When it comes to policy proposals, 72 percent supported a mandate for watermarking AI content, while only 6 percent opposed it. Another 62 percent said they supported the call made by President Joe Biden during his recent State of the Union address to ban AI voice impersonation. AI might be the rare policy issue that still unites Americans — for now. Examining the crosstabs of the poll, which break down responses by age, gender, race, education status, party affiliation (Republican, Independent, or Democrat), and political self-identification (liberal, moderate, or conservative), differences between responses largely fall within or around the poll’s margin of error of 4.9 percent. (Some differences largely track with the modern political landscape, like Democrats being marginally more in favor of AI companies censoring “inappropriate or offensive” content.) But there are signs that a generational shift could be in the cards. The youngest demographic tracked, those 18 to 44 years old, are consistently more likely to support open-sourcing powerful AI models when asked the previously mentioned questions on the topic. They’re also less supportive of watermarks than other age groups, and less concerned that they’ll be able to successfully distinguish real images from fake ones — implying a greater level of comfort with the technology that could shape the debate around it as that generation ages into political power. Read the full poll results and their crosstabs.
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