Six out of ten people would support a six-month suspension of the development of generative AI such as ChatGPT. Photo credit: Freepik.
Prague, April 24 (CTK) – The development of artificial intelligence (AI) makes just under a half of Czechs feel uneasy (48%), and about one-quarter reported feeling both alarmed and excited by it, according to a survey carried out by the Faculty of Social Sciences of Charles University and the Ipsos polling agency.
Six out of ten people would support a call signed by, among others, US entrepreneur Elon Musk, which called for a six-month suspension of the development of the so-called generative AI such as the ChatGPT model.
Czechs have a cautious attitude towards the development of AI, with more than half of them seeing both pros and cons. The rest consider it to be mostly harmful or mostly beneficial to our society.
The survey focused mainly on artificial intelligence in the media.
About 40% of the Czech population said they come into contact with AI at least once a day, with people most often correctly identifying that they encounter AI in products related to human health, such as fitness trackers, or when shopping online. However, most respondents did not know that AI could write news articles in Czech and that some media outlets were already taking advantage of this.
The Czech News Agency (CTK) uses automatic text generation to create simple texts, for example, for news about petrol prices or election results. About half of respondents were able to correctly identify that a report on the price of petrol was generated automatically.
The main author of the survey, Vaclav Moravec from the Faculty of Social Sciences, said that CTK, the public broadcaster Czech Radio and the Seznam portal are the most advanced users of AI in the Czech media sphere.
CTK news editor-in-chief Radka Matesova Markova said CTK does not produce pure AI. Automatically generated texts are subsequently edited by humans, with AI limited to the role of an assistant.
In the case of radio news, specifically an experimental audio recording of a Czech Radio robotic presenter reporting on traffic news, 54% of Czechs identified the voice as human. A further segment of the respondents heard the voice as that of a specific real presenter. Only 9% of them correctly identified it as a robot.
Generally, the survey showed that younger and more educated people have more trust in AI than older and less educated people, though many respondents often chose the answer “I don’t know” when answering the questions.
