In a report released by ThinkPlace, they have surveyed nearly 450 Australians on their perspective of AI mainly in aspects of medical consultancy, tax return and criminal trial. The report indicates that while people are optimistic about the positives of AI in the future, it would take Artificial Intelligence to improve significantly in the aspects mentioned above.

Of the total 444 responses, 47 people identified as Indigenious Australians, 62 identified as living with disability, 57 identified as culturally/linguistically diverse. 41% of the responses were from male while the remaining 59% were from female.

Significant more Trust in Human Doctor than AI

As per the report, nearly 72% of people will trust the prescription given by human doctor than the one given by an AI system in case both prescriptions differ for an infection which requires an antio-biotic medication. This level of trust in human doctor as compared to AI has not changed since last year. In fact, there is a small decline of trust in AI from last year. The report also states that the preference towards AI declined with age.

Preference for AI-cum Human review of Finances for filing Taxes

Hiring an accountant can be a costly affair whereas people may not have significant trust in an AI system which claims to do the same job. As per the report, nearly 49% of the people would prefer to have an AI system to do all the accounting work followed by 15 minutes of human review which will not be heavy on the pocket.

As per the observation, rise in age saw more inclination towards AI-cum human reviewed work to complete the tax return.

Strong Preference Towards Human Jury instead of AI Algorithm for Criminal Trial

The report highlights that people are strongly inclined to have a human jury for reviewing their criminal case rather than to rely to on a AI-based algorithm for evaluation.

Hallucination is one of the biggest possible drawbacks of an AI system. The makers of AI try every possible ways to prevent it however, there is no 100% guarantee of absence of hallucination. This could be a reason why nearly 61% of people would strongly prefer a human jury instead of an AI algorithm.

Humans at Present better than AI in terms of compassion

Majority of respondents believe that AI systems today are extremely less compassionate and they opined that the compassion gap is likely to remain even for the next decade till 2034.

The same sentiment can be observed for trustworthiness with nearly 43% of people believing that AI is “worse than Typical humans”. However, that number is likely to decline to 34.8% by 2034.

AI has surpassed Human Creativity : Opinions from the Australians

Creativity has always been subjective but with the rise of Gen AI systems such as image generators, music generators, and video generators that produces high-quality outputs, the survey shows that people tend to rate AI higher in creativity level than the humans. And that gap in creativity is only going to expand further in the coming decade.

Conclusion

It is to be noted that the no. of respondents for testing is quite small in this case. ThinkPlace claims that in this report, the overall margin of error is 4.65% against a 95% confidence level, calculated using ABS cohort data for jurisdictions in-scope of the study. Low-quality/low-confidence responses have been excluded from the response count and from analysis.