Survey finds many men say they know fictional AI leaders

In short: A new Harvard survey suggests men report more confidence about AI, and many say they recognize AI leaders who are not real.

What's going on

Harvard researchers surveyed more than 5,400 Americans about artificial intelligence, which is computer software that can do tasks like writing text or analyzing data. In the survey, 73 percent of men said they knew who OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was.

The researchers also asked about three other supposed AI leaders: Mira Murati, Susan Milner, and Craig Dalton. Murati is a real person, she is the former chief technology officer at OpenAI and now leads a company called Thinking Machine Labs. Milner and Dalton were invented for the survey, but 53 percent of men said they recognized them.

Women were less likely to claim recognition across the board, but many still did. About 40 percent of women said they knew Milner and Dalton, and 38 percent said they recognized Murati.

The report also found men said they use AI more often and scored a bit better on factual questions about AI. Men and women gave wrong answers at about the same rate, but women more often chose “not sure.” On average, women said “not sure” on 3.3 out of 12 questions, compared with 2.3 for men.

What to watch

Researchers also reviewed a year of media coverage and found men were named in AI headlines far more often than women. Even when looking only at quoted “experts,” about three-quarters were men, higher than the AI workforce, which researchers estimate is roughly 29 percent women. One open question is whether newsrooms, companies, and audiences make more room for voices that admit uncertainty, since AI still has many unanswered questions.

Source: Wired