Consumer Perspectives of Privacy and Artificial Intelligence

New artificial intelligence tools, including virtual personal and voice assistants, chatbots, and large language models like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Meta's Llama 2, and Google's Bard and Gemini rare reshaping the human-technology interface. Given the ongoing development and deployment of AI-powered technologies, a concomitant concern for lawmakers and regulators around the world has been how to minimize their risks to individuals while maximizing their benefits to society. From the Biden-Harris administration's Executive Order 14110 to the political agreement reached on the EU's AI Act, governments around the world are taking steps to regulate AI technologies.

The popularization of generative AI tools, which learn from large quantities of data they scrape from the web, occurs as consumers are increasingly protective of their personal data. As revealed by the IAPP Privacy and Consumer Trust Report 2023, 68% of consumers globally are either somewhat or very concerned about their privacy online. Most find it difficult to understand what types of data about them are being collected and used. The diffusion of AI is one of the newest factors to drive these concerns, with 57% of consumers globally agreeing that AI poses a significant threat to their privacy.