AI’s biggest barrier today isn’t necessarily technical. The technology is still plagued by consumer trust issues. This stems from several objections, including AI’s reliability and its connection to job losses, not to mention all the swirling dystopian fears. A new report from WordPress.com quantifies the issue.
Stepping back, AI’s trust issues are established and acknowledged. The question is more about how fast they will be alleviated. Most emerging tech has a knee-jerk reaction, whether it’s privacy concerns or general disruption to the status quo. But that tends to recede over time with cultural acclimation.
For AI, cultural resistance is breaking down in some ways but building up in others. For the former, it used to be political kryptonite for CEOs to blame mass layoffs on AI. Now it’s become the go-to excuse – even used gladly as a scapegoat for layoffs caused by other mismanagement or over-hiring.
But as those layoffs pile up, the AI backlash piles up with it. And that’s just one source of consternation over AI. Other objections noted above (reliability, robot uprising, etc.) don’t seem to be going away either. The more AI consumes the public consciousness and news cycle, the greater the backlash seems to be.
Pearl Clutching
That brings us back to WordPress’ latest report. More accurately, the report is from Automattic, which owns WordPress.com – one of the biggest hosts in the broader WordPress publishing universe. The report (n=2,000 U.S. adults) reflects consumers’ distaste for brands that use AI in their marketing.
Specifically, 60 percent of consumers report that this AI framing is a turnoff, while 86 percent say they don’t trust AI. Those same users report that they explore original sources when given information by AI. For example, when citations are given alongside AI overviews, they always skip straight to the source.
To put this into perspective, consumers in Automattic’s survey rate AI-generated answers without clear attribution as less trustworthy than airline fees. Ouch. They also rate AI’s trustworthiness lower than confusing privacy policies and medical bills. Double ouch. This obviously doesn’t bode well for AI search.
Beyond trust, AI skepticism is born from a certain degree of pearl clutching or standard resistance to change. About three in four respondents in Automattic’s survey say that the internet feels less human than it did ten years ago. This contrasts the web 2.0 era, which was all about giving everyone a voice.
Worse Than We Thought
Stepping back, it could be argued that these results are aligned with Automattic’s interests, so they should be taken with a grain of salt. In other words, promoting the value of human voices supports the idea behind starting a website. And hosting companies grow the pie for every new website launched.
That said, there are some important takeaways here, and the real consumer voices captured in this study appear genuine. It supports what we already knew in terms of AI’s trust issues, but quantifies where they stand. And on that measure, AI’s trust-driven adoption barriers appear to be worse than we thought.
As for strategic takeaways for businesses of all sizes, there’s no one answer in terms of leaning into AI in brand marketing and messaging. It depends on the audience, so marketers should think about tactics like A/B campaign segmentation, rather than simply jumping at AI jargon to reinvent brand image.
That could mean plain spoken messaging when marketing to everyday folks (lean into the other “A” word: automation). And when marketing in tech-savvy settings like trade press and golf tournaments, let the AI jargon fly. These AI framing tactics are in early stages, so it will take a fair amount of trial and error.
Header image credit: Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash
