Currently reading Bochniarz et al. (2022) on “Attitudes to AI among high school students: Understanding distrust towards humans will not help us understand distrust towards AI”

This is a very interesting (pre-ChatGPT!) study: Bochniarz et al. (2022) investigate highschool students’ concerns regarding perceived negative intentions of AI, i.e. “cynical hostility” towards AI.

For this, they modified a scale for cynical hostility towards humans by modifying the five items (for example “I think artificial intelligence would lie to get ahead”), and have data from 659 highschool students on their cynical hostility towards AI and towards humans, as well as their personality profile and other general ideas about AI.

They find that the relation between personality and cynical distrust towards AI is not the same as for cynical distrust towards humans. It is only weakly related to personality and not to intellect. They also find that how much people distrust AI depends very much on how they conceptualize it and especially what intentions they ascribe to it: “people are more distrustful of AI when it is perceived as more hostile and less governed by emotions“. But interestingly, the higher someone scores on cynical hostility towards humans (but not towards AI!!), the shorter the time they estimate until AI will reach human thinking capabilities, which “suggests that adolescents distrustful towards other people are more confident that the dawn of superintelligent AI is near, which may reflect their anxious attitudes or indicate concerns about rampant conspiracy theories“.

I think this is super interesting, but I wonder how much has changed since ChatGPT was launched at the end of 2022, when normal people suddenly had a much more direct access to AI, AI could do very different things than before, and the conversations changed a lot. While Bochniarz et al. (2022) found that most people expected AI to reach human levels of intelligence in about 20 years from 2022, this might have changed drastically — many likely think that it is here now already, or very soon. So it would be very interesting to see a repeat study now, and especially the connection to conspiracy theories!

Bochniarz, K. T., Czerwiński, S. K., Sawicki, A., & Atroszko, P. A. (2022). Attitudes to AI among high school students: Understanding distrust towards humans will not help us understand distrust towards AI. Personality and Individual Differences, 185, 111299.

And here some more wave watching pictures from a recent dip!

These pictures make me want to paint again.

It is surprisingly difficult to get the colors right!

And also, some of these structures would look very weird when painted, even though when we see them in a picture they look natural.

And now looking in a different direction, and suddenly the sea is green and the sky is overexposed… (notice the Turning Torso towards the right on the horizon)

Now the Turning Torso is on the left, and the water starts looking bluer and bluer towards the right. Look at the position of the floating island here and in the picture below, and notice how the colors are changing even more turning towards the right!

Love a little breaking wave with a glassy crest!

And back towards the left again — check out that little rainbow, how cute!