AI Hallucinations Worry Users More Than Threat of Job Loss, Anthropic Says

Which is scarier? The idea of artificial intelligence (AI) making a mistake, or it taking your job?

New research by Anthropic shows that more people would say “yes” to the first part of that question than to the second.

The findings—released last week and flagged in a report Sunday (March 22) by the Financial Times (FT)—showed that just under 27% of respondents said they were most concerned about mistakes made by AI.

“I had to take photos to convince the AI it was wrong — it felt like talking to a person who wouldn’t admit their mistake,” said a user from Brazil quoted in the report.

“The hallucinations were a disaster. I lost so many hours of work,” said a German entrepreneur, one of 81,000 people interviewed for the study.

Meanwhile, 22% said they were worried about AI’s impact on jobs and the economy, while 16% mentioned “cognitive atrophy” or a loss of critical thinking.

“The risk isn’t losing your ability to think — it’s losing your perspective: you start adopting the AI’s way of structuring things without even noticing,” a user from Germany said.

Deep Ganguli, who heads Anthropic’s societal impacts team and oversaw the research, told the FT the project was designed to “collect this rich human experience using Claude, so it could really inform our research agenda, change our research agenda, change the way we think about building our products, deploying our products.”

The findings come amid a wave of AI-related job losses, with several companies pointing to the technology when announcing layoffs recently.

But as PYMNTS has written, although job cuts tied back to AI invariably foster fears of a larger employment crisis, current labor research indicates that the situation is more complex.

That report cited findings from the World Economic Forum, which argued that while automation and AI will eliminate the need for certain tasks, they will also bring about new categories of work, especially in data, AI oversight, cybersecurity and human-centric services.

The report stressed that this will lead to a time of transition rather than permanent contraction. Many workers’ skills are expected to evolve in the next five years, which will mean retraining and adaptation.

“The pressure is real, but it is directional. Roles centered on routine information processing are most exposed. Roles combining domain expertise, judgment and technological fluency are expanding,” PYMNTS added.

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