AI Usage Is Soaring, But Americans Still Want Humans To Be In Control

Americans are increasingly using artificial intelligence (AI), but they become less comfortable when it makes decisions for them, according to a new survey.

Seventy-two percent of American adults have used at least one AI product, up from 50% from November 2024, according to the National AI Opinion Monitor, a project led by Rutgers University researchers that tracks public opinion on AI. More than a quarter of Americans use AI every day, although a less than one-in-ten would allow it to make final decisions for them without supervision.

More than a majority of Americans want stricter government oversight of AI, although experts believe there is a big difference between wanting regulation and knowing how to regulate AI.

“Americans wanting a human in the loop for major life decisions isn’t all that surprising. In fact, it’s human nature. People naturally are going to want agency over high-stakes choices like hiring, loans, or medical care,” James Czerniawski, the head of emerging technology policy for the Consumer Choice Center, told the DCNF.

“AI agents are intentionally malleable by design, and can be easily modified to deploy in an approval-based architecture, where it does the heavy lifting, data processing and prep work and turns the actual decision making back to the human for the final nod,” Czerniawski added. “If it is used in such a fashion, one could easily see AI agent adoption accelerate.”

The survey found that Americans become far less comfortable having an AI model make the final decision without them.

“People seem to draw the line at letting AI make unsupervised decisions that significantly affect human lives,” Katherine Ognyanova, a professor with the Rutgers School of Communication and Information and a coauthor of the report, said in a statement. “People are somewhat comfortable with a role for AI, just not letting it make the final call.”

Other experts said that the poll showcases that there if often a “trust gap” that precedes technology adoption.

“Early e-commerce had the same problem. Consumers would not put credit cards into websites because the payment infrastructure was not trustworthy. Adoption followed the build-out of the necessary trust infrastructure. This includes Amazon normalizing the “paying online” experience, SSL and secure payments becoming well known ways for consumers to trust sites, and credit-card networks and issuers building anti-fraud technology and policies into the system. Once the risk in the system felt manageable, consumers adopted in droves,” Kristian Stout, the director of innovation policy for the International Center for Law & Economics, told the Daily Caller News Foundation in a written statement.