Fall Privacy Foundation Lunch/Seminar.

Sturm College of Law

Friday, October 17^th from 12:00 to 2:00

Topic: Identity Theft

To register contact:

Kristen Dermyer. Kristen.dermyer@du.edu, Academic Programs Coordinator, 303-871-6487

Perspective.

https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/10/15/how-people-around-the-world-view-ai/

How People Around the World View AI

More are concerned than excited about its use, and more trust their own country and the EU to regulate it than trust the U.S. or China

… A median of 34% of adults across these countries have heard or read a lot about AI, while 47% have heard a little and 14% say they’ve heard nothing at all, according to a spring 2025 Pew Research Center survey.

But many are worried about AI’s effects on daily life. A median of 34% of adults say they are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI, while 42% are equally concerned and excited. A median of 16% are more excited than concerned.

Another perspective.

https://www.bespacific.com/ai-is-not-popular-and-ai-users-are-unpleasant-asshats/

AI is not popular, and AI users are unpleasant asshats

Pivot to AI  – It can’t be that stupid, you must be prompting it wrong: “Some AI papers have a finding so good you just want to quote it everywhere. But many turn out to be trash. They’ve got bad statistics, they’ve got bad methodology, they’re really sales pieces, or they just don’t prove their claimed result. If you see a finding you love, you can’t skip reading the paper before you post about it. Today’s is “Evaluating Artificial Intelligence Use and Its Psychological Correlates via Months of Web-Browsing Data.” It’s a peer-reviewed journal article, published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, September 2025. [Liebert; archive, PDF] The researchers measured 14 million website visits by 499 students and 455 members of the general public over a 90-day period. Firstly, nobody used AI very much — 1% of student web-browsing was AI, 0.44% of the general public study. Secondly, the AI users were not very nice people:

The most consistent predictors of AI use across studies were aversive personality traits (e.g., Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy).

So AI is not actually popular, and AI users are unpleasant assholes. Now you might go “yeah, figures.” But let’s dive in and see how well it backs it up. The first thing the researchers did was not trust the users to self-report. They measured their web browsing by getting 90 days of browser history from Chrome on a desktop — so no mobile or app usage. They did collect the users’ self-reports, which were just incorrect:

we observed that self-reported AI use and actual AI use were only moderately correlated (ρ = 0.329).

If the users went to a chatbot site, that’s obviously AI. For other sites, the researchers picked the Interactive Advertising Bureau category by … running the addresses through a chatbot, GPT-4o. That’s not so great, though they tested GPT-4o against a random 200 of the addresses and it was correct on all but one. So they figured it’d do. The researchers were surprised how low AI usage actually was. The lead author, Emily McKinley, said: [PsyPost]

We were genuinely surprised by how infrequent AI use was, even among students who typically serve as early adopters of emerging technologies.