Professor Nicole Gillespie

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Compared to other countries, Australia is low on trust, we're low on acceptance, we're also low on adoption.

The majority of people say that they're concerned that elections are being impacted by this, about what AI may over time do to our democratic processes.

Through our evolution, we've had, you know, millennia of experience that's embedded in our DNA on how to trust other people, for example.

Here, this very powerful tool that has some human-like capabilities comes along, yet we haven't really had much experience in thinking about how do we calibrate our trust in these tools.

Yeah, so look, our 2025 survey of over 48,000 people across 47 countries, it shows that Australians, you know, are pretty cautious about AI.

So only 36%, just over a third of Australians say that they trust AI systems.

And we find that that low trust holds across a range of different common applications.

So everything from GenAI, so, you know, Claude, ChachiBT, Gemini, those sort of tools.

but also AI systems just generally, so it's capturing that general attitude.

We also ask about trust in AI systems that have specific applications, like AI use in healthcare to aid the diagnosis and treatment of disease, or even in human resources to help with shortlisting job applicants.

So it's really important because trust is contextual.

So we need to really understand it in the context of particular systems.

We also find though that Australians are more trusting of the kind of technical ability of AI and its ability to provide a helpful service.

Where they're particularly cautious is around the safety and security of using these systems and also the impact that AI systems, you know, broadly as they scale up are having on people and also on society.

We want to gain the benefits of AI use, but we want that without the negative impacts.

So we are really concerned about those negative impacts.

And that's also reflected in our mixed emotions.

So we find around 45% of Australians say that they're optimistic about AI, you know, wanting those benefits.