How age influence attitude toward AI

At the moment of writing this post, 361 people took part to the FantasI.A. adventure. A number that starts to be large enough to make the analysis interesting. One thing that many of us experience, especially if you have children, is that children and teenager are extremely comfortable with products that use artificial intelligence. Is this reflected in what we observed in the story? We have now the means for checking this and support (or falsify) this observation with data.

Is it true that younger people have a more positive attitude toward artificial intelligence? Is it a myth or reality?

To answer this let’s check different age groups and let’s check their color. If you don’t know what color of a participant is, you can read the blog post describing it. Basically the more green you are the more positive your attitude toward AI is, the more red you are, the more negative. As a reminder the vertical dashed lines in the plot below indicates the color of the median participant, namely the one that separates the top 50% from the bottom 50% in the color scale. The curve at the top is a visualisation of the distribution of the colours in the respective age group. The higher the curve the more people with that color.

Let’s start now by comparing participants below 20 years of age, and those over 60 years of age (this could encompass two or three generations). The figure below shows that it is evident how really young participants are much more positive than older ones. Note however that the size of the age groups is quite small, so the plot should only serve as an indication, and not something that is necessary representative of a large population. Regardless the indication is quite strong.

comparison_bar_age1

 

We can now compare participants over 60 with participants below 30 (so slightly less young than the age group in the previous plot). Now as you can see from the figure below, the difference is less pronounced but still evident. Yeah, it is true. Young people are more positive toward AI.

comparison_bar_age3

 

So a big difference is with people that are younger than 20 and older. In fact we can also do a slightly different comparison. Participants younger than 20 years of age, and participants in the age range 20-30. In the figure below you can see that the pattern outlined above is still quite visible, indicating that teenagers are extremely positive toward AI with respect with older people.

comparison_bar_age4

 

So what about our myth?

 

Yes the myth is true. Younger generation (and especially teenagers) are extremely more positive toward artificial intelligence than older ones.

 

(featured image credit: Freepik.com)

If not done already, it’s time to take a ride to the FantasI.A. side !