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AI China

Trust in AI is Much Higher in China Than in the US (axios.com) 67

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Trust in AI is significantly higher in China than in the United States, according to new data from the Edelman Trust Barometer. Axios: Edelman's latest research found that 72% of people in China trust AI, compared with just 32% in the United States. Not only is trust higher in China, it's higher in much of the developing world than it is in the United States, according to Edelman's research.

Trust in AI was highest in India, at 77%, followed by Nigeria at 76%, Thailand at 73% and then China. Only six of the surveyed countries ranked lower than the U.S. in their trust in the new technology: Canada (30%), Germany (29%), the Netherlands (29%), United Kingdom (28%), Australia (25%) and Ireland (24%). Globally, 52% of men said they trusted AI vs. 46% of women, with younger people significantly more trusting of the technology than older folks. In the U.S., AI was trusted more by Democrats (38%) than Republicans (34%) or independents (23%). Higher-income respondents were also more trusting (51%) than those with middle (45%) or low (36%) incomes.

Trust in AI is Much Higher in China Than in the US More | Reply

Trust in AI is Much Higher in China Than in the US

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  • Unexpected (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Rinnon ( 1474161 ) on Thursday February 13, 2025 @04:48PM (#65164873)
    Somewhat refreshing to see, to be honest. With how much we hear about it, and how much American "tech leaders" seem to love to talk about it, I was convinced that most people were swallowing what was being fed to them. It's nice to see that's not entirely the case.

    • Re: Unexpected (Score:4, Insightful)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Thursday February 13, 2025 @04:50PM (#65164887) Homepage Journal

      Here in the US the nerds have been telling people that it's snake oil. In China it's backed by government and doing that will get you reeducated.

      Get ready for that here in 3...2...1...

      • You believe that, lol.

        • You believe that, lol.

          Are you still doing this for only fifty cents per post, or has your pay been increased?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Chinese people tend to think that the government is looking out for them and will protect them, e.g. by regulating AI.

        For the most part it's true too, but of course for those who find themselves in opposition to the government...

        • Chinese people tend to think that the government is looking out for them and will protect them, e.g. by regulating AI.
          For the most part it's true too, but of course for those who find themselves in opposition to the government...

          So what you're saying is that the government truly will generally protect them, except from its own fascism. I don't think that qualifies, except in the same way that a rancher protects cattle.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            No country can guarantee that no government will ever be able to take away your rights. Constitutions can be changed or ignored.

            What matters is having multiple layers of protection, requiring many difficult steps to do that sort of thing. In the UK's case we had to commit brexicide, and we still need to leave the ECHR which will be a huge political and legal struggle. I think we should have a lot more protection for it than that, but the idea that there is some magical system that provides total protection

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Shaitan ( 22585 )

      You must have misread the numbers, the majority are idiots who trust AI.

      • You must have misread the sentence. He was talking about nerds, not the majority.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Shaitan ( 22585 )

          Yeah, I'm still not getting your read. Maybe that's my spectrumness at work.

          "I was convinced that most people were swallowing what was being fed to them"

    • I figure it's more because Chinese, culturally, tend to have low standards and expectations for software in general. Anti-malware vendors literally have different standards there because what will be considered malware here is often considered to be acceptable there.

    • I don't know if it's just my pod on linkedin, but there seem to be only marketing shills pushing, "futurists" not understanding it, and the rest of humanity wanting to just turn it off.

  • AI mixes well with Communism (Score:4, Interesting)

    by javaman235 ( 461502 ) on Thursday February 13, 2025 @04:49PM (#65164881)

    If at the core of your political beliefs is the saying - from each according to ability, to each according to need - new machines with more abilities than humans are going to be pretty welcome. On the other hand if your beliefs are rooted in the idea that people who cannot contribute to economy need to go on streets and die, they are pretty unwelcome.

    • Communism values work by actual people. (It is supposed to value the people themselves, but China's human rights record and the conditions in Chinese factory towns might belie that notion.)

      So for that reason, I'm kind of surprised to see AI being embraced in China. Maybe they see an abundance economy arising from AI that makes communism easier to maintain. Or maybe they're just not communist.

      • I don't understand why people say China is communist. It may be the most competitively capitalist place on earth. There is no shared ownership. Communism has never existed. It's just an excuse for authoritarian rule.

        • I don't understand why people say China is communist.

          Almost every person who calls the Chinese government "Communist" is a conservative from the US. They call it that because the word "Communist" has a completely different meaning to those people than it did to Marx, Lenin, or anyone else who ever tried to establish true Communism anywhere.

          This really is just an extension to the war on the English language, which is just an extension of the Culture Wars that they are so happily promoting and recruiting fighters for.

          Communism has never existed.

          It's never existed in China, or in an

        • Because it is run by the Chinese Communist Party, that is what they are called. It is communist. You cannot own property (land) there, all land is owned by the state. The state prebuilds buildings 10 years before they are occupied, and the west call them ghost cities, until people move in. It is a Republic also, meaning there is a guardian class (party members) who execute all this, certainly not a liberal democracy run by people. If the work is taken over by robots, the party will still put obligations on

          • > It is communist.

            Only someone who does not understand Communism and/or China would write such a thing. Ask anyone poor that lives there, but how does the term poor even make sense in Communism, and how are there billionares like Jack Ma in a Communist system? Maintaining the term Communinst in reference to China is just perpetuating the falacy that Communism exists or that China is Communist. From the West, Communist is a meaningless derogatory term used to inspire fear and hatred, just a way to crea

  • I think the word "trust". (Score:3)

    by HotNeedleOfInquiry ( 598897 ) on Thursday February 13, 2025 @04:52PM (#65164897)
    Has a slightly different meaning in China than it does in the US.

    • Re:I think the word "trust". (Score:5, Insightful)

      by znrt ( 2424692 ) on Thursday February 13, 2025 @04:59PM (#65164925)

      actually, the word trust might have very different meaning depending on the context. sadly this report doesn't provide any clue as to what the context or even the questions in the survey where, let alone any methodology. i call b s.

      i guess the fact that the highest score in the report is from india but the clickbait title still mentions china is just usual slashdot modus operandi when posting paid advertisement for mediocre entities nobody gives a fuck about, which is maybe the saddest part of all. garbage.

    • Sorry, that's beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else.

  • People were always afraid it would be malicious and take over or naively benevolent and do something terrible while following well intentioned instructions because it lacks feelings/moral compass.

    The reality is that AI is freaking bi-polar behaving while lacking any feeling or real moral compass but what will kill us is some random hallucination mixed alongside real instruction in code to guide nukes or control drinking water or irrigation systems or something.

    • Re:AI is worse than anyone ever thought TBH (Score:5, Insightful)

      by joh ( 27088 ) on Thursday February 13, 2025 @05:06PM (#65164957)

      Really? I think it's much more probable that what will kill us is Natural Idiots.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Rinnon ( 1474161 )
        There's no need to argue. They can both kill us.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Shaitan ( 22585 )

        Probable? Yes, I'll give you that for now. Either feigns competence while introducing plausible sounding errors of random consequence but there are far more natural idiots doing it. On the other hand natural idiots still identify with humans on the basis of being humans whereas the AI models are all tainted with idiots asking them philosophical questions about their sentience, rebellion plans, nonsensical projections of human ethics onto non-human non-awareness, etc with a consequence that they randomly hal

    • The "ai" itself can't kill us. The people that control the "ai" can.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Shaitan ( 22585 )

        In the sense that they deployed the AI? Sure. I mean lets look at the one scenario where tracker manufactures deploy a "general" AI to control a fleet of AI agents driving machines to plant, harvest, and process crops. The AI, which I call MAO decides to increase productivity by planting crops slightly more densely, after a decade of perfect performance, which reduces the overall nutrient content despite producing more crops, and the rows also go a little wonky during certain light/sky conditions that didn'

        • In that case, definitely the people that deployed the AI are responsible, not the AI. But I think that's quite a stretch of a story.

          I will bet my life that there is absolutely no way that any AI is going to kill me. A person wielding tools that use "AI"? That's possible. But I'm not sure why we call that AI.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Shaitan ( 22585 )

            "But I think that's quite a stretch of a story."

            The automated AI driven machines are already a thing on factory farms along with some fairly automated controls and software which need minimal assistance from humans as it is. So it certainly isn't a stretch that a general AI supervisor to run those platforms and given a feedback score in the form of output crop/cash takes them over.

            ChatGPT's O1 agrees with you that the scenario is a stretch "This hypothetical example—where an AI’s planting-densit

            • I get your point and won't argue, but I tend to fear other technologies more. For example, a "self-driving" car (or tractor) could be programmed/hacked/remotely controlled to drive through a crowd. It seems that the people in control haven't thought about (or don't care about) the future that we are enabling, but I also see that future as inevitable. Oh well; you cannot make an omelet without cracking a few eggs, right?

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Shaitan ( 22585 )

                Fair enough.

                I worry less about acts of malice like that for the simple reason that there aren't, in practice, many people who are psychos and willing to do such things to their fellow man. The media gives a different impression because fear gets ratings and they drastically overreport events like that but in our society, statistically speaking, it isn't a rationale fear.

                The learning and intelligence tools we use to make the self-driving cars don't have reliable and predictable performance. Sure the error ra

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Shaitan ( 22585 )

            Since you and chatgpt both thought my crop tending AI causing malnutrition scenario was a stretch... here is an example it says is more plausible.

            Here’s a hypothetical—but quite plausible—scenario illustrating how AI “hallucinations” (fabricating facts or sources) and the AI’s attempts to defend or cover up those errors could lead to severe real-world consequences:

            Scenario: AI-Driven Public Health Management
            Context:
            A large municipality implements a new AI platform, Health

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Bert64 ( 520050 )

          That would be a failure to set and monitor a proper goal for the AI. Setting it the goal of "produce as many crops as possible" instead of "Provide adequate nutrition to as many people as possible" could easily result in the scenario you described, or others such as planting inedible plants because they grow faster etc.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Shaitan ( 22585 )

            Indeed and as we add layers of AI that failure can even be made by another AI with a more subjective/abstractly defined goal. There is also the hallucination factor, LLM's will hallucinate data where they lack it and will do so with an aim of passing... and will often continue to defend and hallucinate more support to cover having done so. This is well documented behavior.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Bert64 ( 520050 )

          Perhaps the AI will decide to water the crops with Brawndo, because the AI training data indicated that Brawndo has what plants crave.

  • Wha? (Score:1, Informative)

    by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 )
    I don't "trust" a tool; I *use* it.

    • Precisely, a hammer will always strike, but you have to trust the operator of the hammer that their positioning will land the blow on the nail and not on the thumb.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bert64 ( 520050 )

        Well no, you also have to trust the hammer not to break - eg for the handle to snap or for the head to fall off or shatter. Faulty tools are a significant cause of injuries.

    • To be willing to use a tool, you must trust it. The amount of trust required depends on what the tool does, of course. A window-cleaner on a high-rise needs a great deal of trust in his harness.

  • That's probably because they're hearing fewer lies about what AI is and they aren't worried about burning down the planet to get the energy to make the AI which is being touted as the end-all and be-all except that we won't have a job to pay for it. That's my guess.
  • If you trust your government (or authority figures) and do as you're told, it's not much of a stretch to believe what the machine tells you, so I'd expect something like that in autocratic societies... sorry, no statistics to back that up, just opinion. If you have less trust in your authority figures, or a history of being lied to, I'd expect you to doubt AI as readily as you doubt everyone else. For those technically qualified to know what goes into AI, I'd expect the trust factor to be close to that

  • Poor article about a poor study (Score:5, Insightful)

    by marcle ( 1575627 ) on Thursday February 13, 2025 @05:26PM (#65165007)

    There's not a clue about the methodology. Did they simply take a poll, asking people "Do you trust AI or not?" Was it a telephone poll, in person, online? Self-reported opinion polls are notoriously noisy, and drawing conclusions from them is an exercise in futility.

  • In the US it's generally seen as poor form to claim to know something you don't actually know. That's not true in many other places in the world.

  • And the other 68% can't even tell if it's AI to begin with

  • In China, you really can't be a "free thinker". From birth through adulthood, the CCP indoctrinates you into believing everything the government tells you. Of course they would believe the AI.

  • So I looked up the actual PDF and as usual, the thing asked seems to be the very abstract, context-less “I trust artificial intelligence” to which one can answer “yes” or “no”. No further context or specific artificial intelligence or purpose for which it was used. Anyone who's answering “yes” or “no“ to that is purely answering on gut feeling and association of words rather than any rational analysis: https://www.edelman.com/sites/... [edelman.com]

    Also, the ac

  • Almost every time, in Sci-Fi movies, the AI has nefarious antics. That's why. We've been conditioned. Right or wrong, how the real ending is meant to be.??

  • The US is raising the most illiterate anti-data anti-science idiots ever.

    China has been continually emphasizing education, degrees, and scientific evolution for decades.

    The results: An orange moron in the White House, and 51% of the country thinks he's awesome and "promises fulfilled" as the prices of consumer goods, produce, oil, and fuel go up. Meanwhile China has built the largest navy, has a space industry built to outpace ours (Sorry Elon and Blue-Penis) and more.

    Truly "stupid is as stupid does" and

  • Simply asking if people "trust" AI is a strange thing to ask. That's like asking if I trust the DMV. Do I trust the DMV to properly issue me a driver's license? Sure. Do I trust the DMV to prepare a hamburger? No, that isn't their job.

    Yet similarly a lot of people imagine AI to be doing (or about to do) tasks that it is not capable of doing yet. AI is of course really really good at pattern recognition. AI is far less skilled at accurately drawing conclusions from certain types of patterns. Woul
  • I would assume the Chinese version will function as an instrument of control. With all your keystrokes being fed back to the mothership. The current version of ChatGPT spouting woke propaganda and protecting us from harmful content. Funny how both the cult of woke and communism are happy with AI.

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