Every second person sees a threat to democracy in AI

Every second person in Germany between the ages of 16 and 75 sees AI applications such as the use of the text robot ChatGPT as a threat to democracy. This emerges from a representative survey by the opinion research institute Forsa, for which 1021 people were interviewed.

“Citizens fear a wave of fake news, propaganda and manipulated images, texts and videos,” said Joachim Bühler, Managing Director of the TÜV Association. The association commissioned the survey from the institute.

84 percent of those surveyed assumed that artificial intelligence (AI) would significantly accelerate the spread of “fake news”. 91 percent believed that in the future it would hardly be possible to tell whether photos or videos were real or fake. More than eight out of ten respondents therefore called for a legal framework for the ethical development and use of AI. A similar number were also in favor of an education offensive on how to deal with AI and a labeling requirement for content generated with it.

According to the survey, almost every fourth respondent has already tried the ChatGPT application professionally or privately – but this decreased significantly with increasing age. 43 percent of 16 to 35 year olds stated that they had already used ChatGPT once. For respondents between 56 and 75 it was only 7 percent. However, every second person generally assumed that the opportunities offered by AI outweighed the risks.

Applications based on machine learning, in which software sifts through large amounts of data and draws conclusions from it, are usually referred to as artificial intelligence. In recent months, the developer company OpenAI has caused a stir with its chatbot ChatGPT, which can formulate sentences like a human.