{"id":274628,"date":"2025-11-06T06:46:13","date_gmt":"2025-11-06T06:46:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/274628\/"},"modified":"2025-11-06T06:46:13","modified_gmt":"2025-11-06T06:46:13","slug":"most-americans-think-ai-will-destroy-humanity-someday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/274628\/","title":{"rendered":"Most Americans think AI will ‘destroy humanity’ someday"},"content":{"rendered":"

A majority of Americans (53%) now think artificial intelligence<\/a> is likely to \u201cdestroy humanity\u201d someday, according to a new Yahoo\/YouGov poll.<\/p>\n

The survey of 1,770 U.S. adults was conducted from Oct. 23 to 27, a period bookended by the arrival of OpenAI\u2019s new artificial-intelligence-powered web browser, ChatGPT Atlas<\/a>, and the revelation that Nvidia<\/a>, the AI chip-making giant, had become the first publicly traded company to top $5 trillion in market value<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Yet real people seem much more pessimistic about AI \u2014 and its potential impact on their lives \u2014 than Silicon Valley and Wall Street.<\/p>\n

To be sure, an overwhelming majority of Americans who have used AI chatbots (85%) say they have \u2014 so far \u2014 found them to be at least somewhat helpful, including a third (33%) who say they have found them to be very helpful (with relatively little difference by age). Just 15% of users say their own experience with AI chatbots has been mostly negative; the rest say their experience has been either mostly positive (40%) or equally positive and negative (41%).<\/p>\n

It\u2019s what happens next that Americans are worried about.<\/p>\n

Despite some satisfactory early impressions, skepticism about the upside of AI is already creeping into public opinion. One issue is the rapid online proliferation of AI-generated content. Most Americans (55%) now say they \u201csee online content that was produced by artificial intelligence rather than by people\u201d either every day (25%) or frequently (30%); even more (59%) complain that they see AI-generated content \u201ctoo often.\u201d Just 15% of Americans say they see it \u201cabout the right amount\u201d (15%) or \u201cnot enough\u201d (2%).<\/p>\n

Respondents recognize the risk here: distinguishing reality from AI-generated unreality. A majority of Americans (56%) confess to having “encountered something made by artificial intelligence (AI) that you initially thought was real” \u2014 and while roughly the same number (54%) say they\u2019re at least somewhat confident that they can determine whether \u201conline content was produced by artificial intelligence or by people,” a mere 21% of Americans are similarly confident that \u201cother people\u201d can tell the difference.<\/p>\n

Nearly two-thirds of Americans (65%) say they are not confident in others\u2019 ability to differentiate human content from AI content.<\/p>\n

Perhaps as a result, just 16% of Americans say they feel like AI chatbots make them smarter, while far more say “smarter in some ways, dumber in others” (30%); dumber (18%); or that they have no effect (30%). Likewise, just 17% of Americans think AI will have a mostly positive effect on their own lives, while far more say AI\u2019s effect will be mostly negative (32%) or equally positive and negative (34%).<\/p>\n

But what about AI\u2019s impact on humanity as a whole?<\/p>\n

According to the poll, a mere 10% of Americans think AI\u2019s impact on humanity will turn out to be mostly positive; a plurality (47%) expect it to be mostly negative. To find out why, Yahoo and YouGov asked Americans to read four \u201cpredictions about AI\u201d and say \u201chow likely\u201d it is that each \u201cwill come true at some point in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s how they responded:<\/p>\n

61% of Americans say it\u2019s somewhat or very likely that \u201cAI will continue to improve, but it will never surpass human intelligence.\u201d<\/p>\n

64% of Americans say it\u2019s somewhat or very likely that \u201cAI will be able to perform any intellectual task a human can.\u201d<\/p>\n

60% of Americans say it\u2019s somewhat or very likely that \u201cAI will become so intellectually advanced that it will help us solve complex problems like curing cancer and stopping climate change.\u201d<\/p>\n

63% of Americans say it\u2019s somewhat or very likely that \u201cAI will become so intellectually advanced that humans won\u2019t be able to control it anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

And 53% of Americans say it\u2019s somewhat or very likely that \u201cAI will destroy humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, roughly six in 10 Americans believe that AI will someday exceed human capacity \u2014 and human control. And almost all of them think that could spell doom for the human race.<\/p>\n

Notably, the number of Americans who think it\u2019s \u201cvery likely\u201d that AI will eventually use its powers to cure cancer or stop climate change (15%) is smaller than the number who think that AI is very likely to destroy humanity (20%).<\/p>\n

__________________<\/p>\n

The Yahoo survey was conducted by YouGov using a nationally representative sample of 1,770 U.S. adults interviewed online from Oct. 23 to Oct. 27, 2025. The sample was weighted according to gender, age, race, education, 2024 election turnout and presidential vote, party identification and current voter registration status. Demographic weighting targets come from the 2019 American Community Survey. Party identification is weighted to the estimated distribution at the time of the election (31% Democratic, 32% Republican). Respondents were selected from YouGov\u2019s opt-in panel to be representative of all U.S. adults. The margin of error is approximately 3.1%.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A majority of Americans (53%) now think artificial intelligence is likely to \u201cdestroy humanity\u201d someday, according to a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":274629,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,21808,181,507,37682,74],"class_list":["post-274628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-ai-chatbots","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-humanity","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=274628"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274628\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/274629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=274628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}