Dissociation Between Users’ Explicit and Implicit Attitudes Toward Artificial Intelligence: An Experimental Study

The latest developments in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) have given rise to many ethical and socio-economic concerns. Nonetheless, the impact of AI technologies is evident and tangible in our everyday life. This dichotomy leads to mixed feelings toward AI: people recognize the positive impact of AI, but they also show concerns, especially about their privacy and security. In this article, we try to understand whether the implicit and explicit attitudes toward AI are coherent. We investigated explicit and implicit attitudes toward AI by combining a self-report measure and an implicit measure, i.e., the implicit association test. We analyzed the explicit and implicit responses of 829 participants. Results revealed that while most of the participants explicitly express a positive attitude toward AI, their implicit responses seem to point in the opposite direction. Results also show that, in both the explicit and implicit measures, females show a more negative attitude than males, and people who work in the field of AI are inclined to be positive toward AI.