Metaphors of AI indicate that people increasingly perceive AI as warm and human-like

Abstract

As AI-based technologies such as ChatGPT are increasingly used across various sectors, understanding how people conceptualize artificial intelligence (AI) is crucial for anticipating public response and developing AI technologies responsibly 1. We hypothesize that public perceptions of AI are rapidly evolving, and that these perceptions inform not only how people use AI, but also the extent to which they trust it and the role they believe it should play in their lives - if at all. However, beliefs about complex sociotechnical systems like AI are nuanced and hard to articulate2–4, especially using traditional self-reporting methods where people may struggle to clearly articulate their implicit attitudes about emerging technologies 5. To overcome these limitations, we collected over 12,000 open-ended metaphor responses over 12 months from a nationally representative U.S. sample and developed a systematic framework to quantitatively analyze them. Here we show that US Americans perceive AI as warm and competent, with attributions of human-likeness and warmth increasing significantly in the year after ChatGPT was introduced, and that these perceptions strongly predict trust and willingness to adopt AI technologies. We also identify important demographic variations, with women, older individuals, and people of color more likely to attribute human-like qualities to AI, helping explain disparities in trust and adoption rates. This scalable metaphor analysis approach enables tracking multifaceted public attitudes to inform AI governance, revealing how perceptions influence technology adoption across different populations. Analyzing 12,000 metaphors of AI from a year-long U.S. survey, this study introduces a scalable framework for quantitatively analyzing implicit perceptions from open-ended language and shows that Americans increasingly view AI as warm and human-like.

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