In 2021, about a third of Swedes stated that they used artificial intelligence (AI) every day. In 2023, that figure is down to 12 percent, according to the report The Swedish people and AI 2023 from Insight intelligence. This despite the massive impact of AI globally in recent years, with services such as Chat GPT.
“Statistically, that’s true,” says Lukas Berg and continues:
— A reasonable explanation is that many people “think wrongly” about whether they use AI or not. In the past, many people may have reasoned that AI was probably in the tools they used. Now that we’ve gotten more pure AI tools, many may think that they don’t use those particular services and therefore don’t use AI.
“A little ashamed”
Tobias Falk, university lecturer at the Department of Computer and System Science at Stockholm University, also shares this line of thinking:
— It has also become almost a little ugly to use AI. At least in some industries, that it is something you are ashamed to admit. You might use it as support or a ballpark but don’t want to sign with it.
The report The Swedish people and AI 2023 also shows that there is a real difference in how much knowledge about AI different groups of society say they have. Generally speaking, it is the highly educated with a high monthly income who indicate that they have a good understanding.
— AI risks becoming a class issue. We clearly see that the interest in AI and the knowledge people say they have about AI increases with education level and salary level, says Lukas Berg.
AI bubble
Tobias Falk says that people generally have far too much faith in what AI can do.
— People’s imagination about AI is much better than what AI is in reality.
Falk believes that AI has so far accelerated many processes in various fields, but in itself has not revolutionized any field.
— AI under-delivers in that way, compared to the image of AI. In a way, you could say that we are at the beginning of an AI bubble. Enormous changes are sketched out, and maybe there will be, but it might not happen as quickly or as dramatically as you think.
Much of the reporting surrounding AI in the past year has been about potential catastrophes linked to the technology ‘taking over the world’. An exaggerated image, Falk believes:
— Precisely the horror scenarios about AI do more harm than good. As a rule, it is people who run the world to the bottom.