As adoption of AI skyrockets, a wide gap has emerged between everyday people who worry that artificial intelligence will take jobs and degrade thinking ability, and AI experts and industry insiders who hold a far more optimistic view, a new report by Stanford University’s AI center suggested.
Close to two-thirds of adults said they interact with AI at least several times a week, and almost a third said they interact with it almost constantly or several times a day. More than 80% of U.S. high school and college students are using AI for schoolwork, according to the annual AI Index report by Stanford’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence center.
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Meanwhile, almost two-thirds of U.S. adults expect AI to reduce jobs over the next 20 years, according to the annual AI Index report by Stanford’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence center.
Only about one in five said they thought AI would improve the job market, and just over a third said they expected the technology to make their own jobs better, said the report, which drew on surveys by the Pew Research Center, Elon University in North Carolina, and the Forecasting Research Institute.
Large numbers of respondents said they worried that reliance on AI would degrade people’s cognitive and decision-making abilities.
However, the researchers found, on nearly every aspect of AI, academic experts, analysts, and people developing the technology “report more optimism than the U.S. public.”
The report does not seek to explain the gap, but notes that it has emerged amid “increasing awareness and adoption of AI in the United States.”
Sha Sajadieh, who as the leader of Stanford’s AI Index oversaw the report, believes the large gap between public views on AI and the way experts and industry insiders see the technology comes down to how well people understand its strengths, weaknesses, promises and perils.
“Folks who are dealing with this technology, like any other trade, you come up against its shortcomings and you know it quite intimately,” Sajadieh said. Much of the information that reaches the public comes in the form of headlines, “highlights” and “lowlights,” Sajadieh said.
On employment, many experts “see this technology as being more part and parcel of the everyday work life of a person,” Sajadieh said.
San Jose State University political science professor Andrew Alexander doesn’t believe lack of knowledge explains people’s worries about employment in an AI future. News reports highlight the potential for the technology to kill jobs, Alexander noted. AI companies hype their products’ ability to do human work. Employers paying for AI order their workers to use it or face getting replaced by it. Meanwhile, unemployment rose from 3.4% in mid-2023 to 4.3% in March, federal government data show.
Even the reasons for public pessimism and expert optimism about the technology are hotly debated.
San Francisco company DoNotPay uses AI for tasks such as helping consumers cancel subscriptions and resolve disputes with companies. But its CEO Joshua Browder believes other applications of AI are leading people to mistrust it.
“The public is fed up with AI and very disillusioned with it being used against them,” Browder said. “You’re seeing stories about airlines using AI to double people’s ticket prices. Scammers are using AI.”
“People already feel very precarious as far as jobs go,” Alexander said.
Messaging on employment from high-profile AI company CEOs has not clarified the outlook.
Dario Amodei, CEO of San Francisco AI titan Anthropic, said last year that the technology could take half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years.
“People see that, and they go, ‘Crap, crap, crap, what does that mean?’” said Ed Zitron, an AI researcher and owner of San Francisco public relations firm EZPR.
But earlier this year, Amodei acknowledged he didn’t believe AI had started replacing humans.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said last year that “whole classes of jobs” would disappear as AI transforms work. But Altman in February, addressing reports of AI job replacement, referred to “AI washing” by companies “blaming AI for layoffs that they would otherwise do.”
Zitron sees AI executives’ predictions of job losses as marketing aimed at companies seeking to cut labor costs through automation, and as a strategy for sowing fear that people and businesses that don’t adopt their products will be left behind.
“These companies need this thing to be seen as essential because that’s the only way they can keep raising the money,” Zitron said.
Zitron attributed optimism around AI to self interest.
“I can’t think of one person I’ve met who doesn’t receive compensation for it who is enthusiastic,” Zitron said.
A Yale University study released in April concluded that although “anxiety over the effects of AI on today’s labor market is widespread, our data suggests it remains largely speculative (and) it is too soon to tell how disruptive the technology will be to jobs.”
Peter Rodriguez of San Jose, who’s working on launching a business selling security doors and awnings, pointed to the AI-powered delivery robots that crawl Bay Area sidewalks as an example of the technology already replacing people.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library in San Jose, Calif. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
“They are taking Uber drivers’ jobs,” said Rodriguez, 47.
Although he believes his enterprise would keep his own employment safe from AI, Rodriguez has concerns about economic upheaval if many other jobs are replaced.
“I worry,” he said, “but at the same time I can’t prevent it.”
Nikhil Kanaparthi, a San Jose State master’s student in data science, said two of his family members who were laid off from data science jobs blame AI. But he integrates AI into his workflow, and believes human collaboration with the technology is the future of employment.
“It’s going to replace the people who don’t know about AI,” said Kanaparthi, 24.
San Jose State undergraduate Lexie Castro said she’s pursuing a career in speech pathology in part because she believes the job — treating speech and language disorders — is immune to AI replacement.
“I’ve met like three people who claim that AI really put them out of a job, mostly in tech,” said Castro, 24.
As with employment, uncertainty surrounds the effects of AI use on people’s cognitive and decision-making abilities. Disagreements focus on whether the technology helps or replaces learning. About half of U.S. adults felt AI was likely to degrade human abilities to make decisions and evaluate one’s own thinking processes, compared to a third of experts.
Stanford’s Sajadieh said effective use of AI requires knowledge of its deficiencies, and she attributed public concerns around cognition to a “lack of education around how to use these tools well.”
Experts express more optimism because working with AI will create new types of tasks, and “our cognitive abilities will transform alongside of it,” Sajadieh said.
However, a growing body of research suggests AI may be dumbing down its users.
A 2025 study of 120 undergraduate Brazilian business students with varying degrees of experience using AI found the technology “facilitated a form of cognitive offloading that eliminated the desirable difficulties needed for deep learning,” and could “significantly impair long-term knowledge retention.”
San Jose State professor Alexander said it appears students’ heavy reliance on AI for writing assignments is making them fearful of doing the work themselves. “The less they’re doing it the more impossible the task seems to be,” Alexander said.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers in a paper published in February reached a broader, societal conclusion that use of AI, by reducing the effort of obtaining information, could substantially reduce individual contributions to humanity’s general knowledge and cause a “knowledge collapse.”
San Jose State student Castro said despite the prevalence of AI use among her fellow students, she tries to avoid it.
“It doesn’t challenge you,” she said. “I don’t see how you could make anything transformative.”
Despite public worries about the fallout from AI, Alexander said, the rapid, widespread adoption of the technology can be chalked up as a massive success for AI companies that aim “to make this so ubiquitous that people can’t imagine not having it.”