Only 16 percent of Americans think AI will have a positive impact on society, a new study shows
Despite the fact that AI increasingly dominates our economy (it’s hot IPO summer and we’re all just along for the ride), most Americans are not particularly optimistic about the technology’s long term impact on the country, a new study from Pew Research reveals. In fact, although a whole lot of Americans increasingly use AI in their daily lives, most of them have neutral to negative views about it, the research reveals. Only 16 percent of Americans think that AI’s impact on society during the next 20 years will be positive, Pew says, while around 40 percent say that it will have a negative impact.
- ▪Despite the fact that AI increasingly dominates our economy (it’s hot IPO summer and we’re all just along for the ride), most Americans are not particularly optimistic about the technology’s long term impact on the country, a new study from
- ▪In fact, although a whole lot of Americans increasingly use AI in their daily lives, most of them have neutral to negative views about it, the research reveals.
- ▪Only 16 percent of Americans think that AI’s impact on society during the next 20 years will be positive, Pew says, while around 40 percent say that it will have a negative impact.
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| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/17/only-16-percent-of-americans-think-ai-will-have-a-positive-impact-on-society-a-new-study-shows/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 17 Jun 2026 17:00:01 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-17T17:02:56.152Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-17T17:04:46.618Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | rJ25PdDzykZl |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Despite the fact that AI increasingly dominates our economy (it’s hot IPO summer and we’re all just along for the ride), most Americans are not particularly optimistic about the technology’s long term impact on the country, a new study from Pew Research reveals. In fact, although a whole lot of Americans increasingly use AI in their daily lives, most of them have neutral to negative views about it, the research reveals. Only 16 percent of Americans think that AI’s impact on society during the next 20 years will be positive, Pew says, while around 40 percent say that it will have a negative impact. A vast majority of people (67 percent) don’t believe that the U.S. government will do anything to meaningfully regulate AI.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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