(The Center Square) – Artificial intelligence replacing human beings in tasks is detrimental to purpose and meaning in life, and will not allow people to find greater purpose in life, says a new report and poll from Elon University’s Imagining the Digital Future research center.
When posed with a statement, “By replacing human beings in most tasks, AI will undermine our sense of purpose and meaning in life,” 64% agreed and only 36% agreed with the opposing statement, “By freeing human beings from most routine tasks, AI will allow us to find greater purpose and meaning in life.”
American adults surveyed by an overwhelming 69% said AI will weaken human-to-human bonds.
The national public opinion poll accompanies the report, Human Purpose in Peril, authored by Lee Rainie and Janna Anderson. Respondents totaled 1,505 adults, including 1,163 users of large language models – meaning, they said yes to having in the past week used ChatGPT from OpenAI, Gemini from Google, Copilot from Microsoft, Meta AI also known as Llama, Claude AI from Anthropic, Grok from Xai, and DeepSeek.
The terms LLM users, bots or chatbot users is used to describe the group as a whole. The survey was May 14-18 and carries a +/- 3.1% margin of error.
Rainie is the director of the Imagining the Digital Future Center, and Anderson a journalism professor, and cofounder and senior researcher at the Imagining the Digital Future Center. In the executive summary, they write, “It is important to note that despite the significant worries they reported in this survey, most people also expressed generally positive reactions about their AI use, noting that bots have helped them learn new things, inspired them to create something better than they would have on their own, offered better advice than they might have received from family or friends and helped them prepare for difficult human-to-human conversations.”
The report says one-fifth of LLM users have built a custom AI agent; it’s 36% for ages 18-29 users.
According to the report, 55% “are not confident that their fellow humans will retain their ability to think critically and evaluate information versus 15% who are confident about that.”
In another double-edged sword, many LLM users “admitted to worrisome personal behavioral shifts: 51% said they felt they were being lazy or taking easy shortcuts at least some of the time when using bots; 39% said they are growing overly dependent on LLMs to give them answers rather than thinking for themselves; 39% feel they are cheating at time by using chatbots; 22% said they have felt manipulated.”
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