Almost 2 in 3 say AI development a bad thing: Survey

A poll released by Marquette University Law School on Thursday found that almost two-thirds of Americans say they think the development of AI is a bad thing.

In the poll, 64 percent of respondents said AI is bad for society, and 36 percent said it’s a good thing, according to a release . This marked a 6-point drop from a July poll, in which 70 percent of people said they viewed AI as a bad thing. The number was at 65 percent in May and 70 percent in April.

But pollsters also found that even with the sour outlook on the technology, 69 percent of respondents said they use AI, compared with 31 percent who said they don’t. This is an increase from all three of Marquette’s previous polls.

Respondents saw few benefits to data centers, with 33 percent saying data centers “maintain U.S. leadership in AI. Thirty percent said the digital economy relies on data centers, 29 percent said data centers produce new permanent jobs and 19 percent said they provide construction jobs.

Among respondents, 54 percent told Marquette the top significant cost of data centers is the high water use, followed by 51 percent who said the centers drive up electricity costs.

A smaller number of respondents — 30 percent — mentioned how the centers replace rural or agricultural land. Fourteen percent said the tax subsidies are not worth it, while another 14 percent said the centers create few permanent jobs. Thirteen percent also noted the centers produce too much noise.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill and tech leaders have called for more guardrails to be set up to regulate AI. Rep. George Whitesides (D-Calif.) called for a one-month “ safety stand-down ” to allow independent experts to come together and talk about what “red lines” should be established and then have Congress work to put those red lines into law.

Calls for regulating AI have grown after a researcher at Anthropic warned last week that the “people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

On the other side of the aisle, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) blocked Sen. John Kennedy’s (R-La.) request to pass legislation that would require tech companies to develop a “kill switch” for AI if it posed a threat to humanity.

President Trump, a longtime critic of regulations in general, wrote on Truth Social on Monday that the “only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!”

This reaction prompted Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who supports AI regulation, to say it was “embarrassing … how ignorant this president is about the dangers of AI.”

The Marquette University survey was conducted Sept. 2-9 and included 1,023 respondents with a margin of error of 4.3 percentage points.