The numbers
Fifty-three per cent of American adults say artificial intelligence is doing more harm than good in kindergarten through twelfth grade education, against 27% who say it is doing more good than harm. For colleges and universities the split is 54% to 24%.
The figures come from the NBC News Decision Desk Poll, conducted online with SurveyMonkey among 7,105 adults between 20 August and 1 September, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.3 percentage points.
In both cases roughly twice as many people see harm as see benefit. That is a wide margin for a question about a technology most respondents have some direct exposure to.
Avoidance as a strategy
The more interesting movement is in a second question. A growing share of US adults now say that schools which avoid the technology will do a better job of helping students grow than schools which embrace it.
That is a different claim from thinking AI is currently being used badly. It treats abstention as a viable educational position rather than a temporary caution — and it runs directly against the direction institutional policy has been moving, which is towards integration, procurement and staff training.
Why schools are a harder case
Education is an unusually difficult setting for these tools, for a reason that has little to do with the tools. The purpose of a school assignment is not the assignment. It is the cognitive work the student does producing it. An instrument that completes the artefact without the work removes the thing being paid for.
That problem does not arise in most workplace uses, where the artefact is the point and nobody cares how it was produced. It makes education a poor test case for AI’s general usefulness, and a very good test case for public trust, because parents and students are evaluating something they can see the results of directly.
What it does not settle
A poll of opinion is not a measurement of learning outcomes. Nothing here establishes whether AI use has helped or harmed anyone’s education, and the research literature on that question is thin and contested.
What the numbers do establish is the political weather. Legislators writing rules on AI in classrooms — and several states are — are working in front of an electorate that has already made up its mind about the direction, if not the detail. Pew published separate global data on Thursday showing 71% of Americans expect AI to reduce the number of jobs. The two findings point the same way.
