The latest nationally representative ONS survey documents a substantial deterioration in public confidence: 38% of adults now believe AI presents more risks than benefits, up from 25% in August 2024, while only 13% perceive more benefits than risks. The dominant concerns are difficulty distinguishing fake information, reported by 81%; use of personal data without consent, 77%; and increased cybercrime exposure, 63%.
The latest nationally representative ONS survey documents a substantial deterioration in public confidence: 38% of adults now believe AI presents more risks than benefits, up from 25% in August 2024, while only 13% perceive more benefits than risks.
Thirty-two percent would trust AI with none of the listed tasks, and trust was especially low for government decision-making. This provides stronger longitudinal evidence that public skepticism is increasing even as workplace and educational adoption expands.
Read the evidence behind this analysis. External links open in a new tab.
Office for National Statistics
A review of evidence across cognitive science, education, medicine, and human-factors research finds that fully offloading mental work to AI can weaken the acquisition and retention of the specific skills people stop practicing. The authors distinguish that evidence from broader claims about declining intelligence: effects on foundational abilities such as attention and working memory remain uncertain, while AI used as a collaborator, tutor, or source of feedback can preserve or improve learning.
In a randomized field experiment across a chain of middle and high schools in Turkey, giving teachers a generative-AI support tool reduced students’ intrinsic motivation by 0.11 standard deviations. Average academic performance did not change, but students taught by lower-performing teachers experienced significant declines in both performance and confidence, showing that a tool that makes lesson preparation easier for teachers does not automatically improve the student experience.
The European Commission has issued operational guidance for Article 50 of the AI Act before its transparency obligations begin applying on August 2, 2026. Providers must disclose when people are interacting with systems such as chatbots, agents, or avatars and make generative outputs detectable through machine-readable marking; deployers must disclose emotion-recognition or biometric-categorization uses and clearly label deepfakes and certain AI-generated public-interest text when it lacks human review or editorial control.