Professor Nicole Gillespie

On average, four in five people are concerned about a range of negative outcomes from AI.

So I think that's a reason for sort of optimism in some way in the sense that we can come together and really work cooperatively to try to solve some of those issues and address the risks.

So really when you sort of tease about where Australia sits, it's not necessarily that we see the risks differently.

It's really more that we tend to see the balance between the risks and the benefits differently.

So I think a really telling indicator there is it's only 30% of Australians that think that the benefits of AI outweigh the risks.

And that's, again, the lowest of all 47 countries we surveyed.

It's 69% by comparison in China where they see the benefits as outweighing the risks.

So look, I think it partly reflects what we consider to be like the drivers of AI.

So across four sort of indicators that we see through our modelling is really influencing trust.

Australia is actually low on all of them.

And I think one that's really important is we're low on AI literacy.

So it's only about a quarter of Australians that say that they've had any sort of AI training or sort of education.

And it's really hard to trust something if you don't feel that you understand it.

So that's definitely one factor.

Another is we're not seeing the safeguards to provide that reassurance that the risks are being mitigated.

We actually find that it's only 30% of Australians that believe that the current regulations and governance are sufficient to make AI use safe, and that's lower than many other countries as well.

So it's sort of that combination also because we're adopting it less and perhaps because we don't have the training, we're also finding that we're not seeing the benefits and therefore the risks are not being sort of offset by the benefits that we're seeing.

Well, I think this is it, is that part of the learning with AI comes from its actual use with it, right?

So I often think about, you know, 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, you know, all the micro cues and the different things that we look for.

And we're learning that from birth.