How do citizens perceive the use of Artificial Intelligence in public sector decisions?

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become increasingly prevalent in almost every aspect of our lives. At the same time, a debate about its applications, safety, and privacy is raging. In three studies, we explored how UK respondents perceive the usage of AI in various public sector decisions. Our results are fourfold. First, we found that people prefer AI to have considerably less decisional weight than various human decision-makers; those being: politicians, citizens, and (human) experts. Secondly, our findings revealed that people prefer AI to provide input and advice to these human decision-makers, rather than letting AI make decisions by itself. Thirdly, although AI is seen as contributing less to perceived legitimacy than these human decision-makers, similar to (human) experts, its contribution is seen more in terms of output legitimacy than in terms of input and throughput legitimacy. Finally, our results suggest that the involvement of AI is perceived more suitable for decisions that are low (instead of high) ideologically-charged. Overall, our findings thus show that people are rather skeptical towards using AI in the public domain, but this does not imply that they want to exclude AI entirely from the decision-making process.