New figures show rapidly increasing amount of Australians are fed up with AI and say it will force ‘extinction’
After nearly three years of having AI at our fingertips, Australians are now becoming incredibly bleak about the future of mankind.
After nearly three years of having it at our fingertips, Australians are now becoming increasingly wary of artificial intelligence and the undeniable risks it poses.
New research has suggested the country is somewhat split between seeing AI as a powerful tool and fearing it as a force that could one day wipe us all out.
What was very recently a “kooky conspiracy theory” has now become a genuine concern amongst millions as the world throttles towards another existential event horizon.
After enjoying a chaotic but fruitful honeymoon period, the latest Roy Morgan study found that 65 per cent of Australians now believe AI “creates more problems than it solves”, running counter to the rhetoric pushed by several major corporations rushing to adopt the new “productivity tool”.
OpenAI has led the charge, repeating a paradox that has left many confused. While he claims the “inevitable” AI boom is a positive for the economy, CEO Sam Altman concedes that there are many, many unknowns when it comes to the rapid development of a technology that could render humanity “redundant”.
Still, the world’s AI developers race towards artificial general intelligence (AGI), knowing full well that they could be contributing to a total collapse. They’ve put all their eggs in the “make money now” basket, and it appears to be working for now as tech markets surge.
What is known, however, is that the first nation (or company) to achieve AGI will wield inconceivable power with the theoretical ability to dismantle the white collar workforce.
Those are just the early predictions.
Some are optimists and believe we will be able to code an unshakeable sense of morality into AI. Others joke that if we tell a supercomputer to “fix climate change” or “remove spam emails”, we might risk being annihilated once it realises the most definitive answer is to delete humans from Earth.
Either way, it hasn’t taken long for some Aussies to cotton on to the existential conundrum placed at everyone’s feet.
One in four Australians now say AI poses a risk of human extinction within the next two decades, according to Roy Morgan. Those figures rose five percentage points in the past 12 months alone.
“Artificial intelligence is reshaping our world faster than most Australians ever imagined, and that rapid change is fuelling both excitement and unease,” said Roy Morgan CEO Michele Levine.
“A surprising one in four now see artificial intelligence as a potential existential risk within twenty years.”
MORE: 6 essential workplace skills in the age of AI
But the topic of doomsday is also great for headlines. No matter where you look throughout history, humanity has always prophesied its own destruction in some way or another.
Thousands of years ago, the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia held flood myths, describing natural disasters as gods wiping out humanity. Then came Christianity, which had many believers fearing an imminent apocalypse tied to sin.
In the 1300s, when the plague killed up to a third of Europe’s population, chroniclers wrote of abandoned towns and a sense that “the end of mankind had come.”
In 1910, panic spread when scientists said Halley’s Comet’s tail contained cyanogen gas, leading several to believe Earth’s atmosphere would be poisoned. Then came the 1940s and the nuclear arms race. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ushered in the very real idea that humans could end themselves with the push of a button.
But it’s a bit different this time around.
In 2025, the idea of extinction through irrelevance is coursing through the minds of millions across the globe. Everyone who has seen the outrageously realistic Sora videos coming out feels the same way: that productive human output will eventually be phased out due to efficiency.
Who’s most sceptical?
Roy Morgan’s research shows the scepticism amongst Aussies is not evenly spread.
Women (69 per cent) are slightly more likely than men (61 per cent) to believe AI creates more problems than it solves. Older Australians are somewhat more concerned than younger ones, with 68 per cent of those aged over 65 holding negative views, compared with 62 per cent of people aged 35–49.
Geography plays a role too. Australians outside the cities are more doubtful (69 per cent) than those living in urban centres (63 per cent). By state, South Australia (73 per cent) and Tasmania (71 per cent) are the most sceptical, while NSW (63 per cent) and Victoria (64 per cent) are the least. Queensland and WA both sit near the national average at 66 per cent.
Australians who worry about AI point to a range of risks, from the erosion of human creativity and independent thinking to the spread of misinformation and deepfakes that make it harder to separate fact from fiction.
That issue alone is monumental in today’s day of cyber attacks and sophisticated propaganda pushed by foreign actors. The speed at which a highly realistic misinformation video can be created and shared is staggering, and people are taking notice.
Others highlight its environmental footprint, citing the heavy energy and water use of data centres.
It’s personal
Interestingly, when Australians are asked whether AI creates more problems than it solves “for you personally,” the results soften. Nationally, scepticism falls slightly, from 65 per cent to 61 per cent.
While Australians recognise AI’s potential benefits in their own lives, they remain uneasy about its broader impact on society.
Tools like ChatGPT are now so effective at tailoring responses and “learning” from each user that they have become irreplaceable in most workplaces. The ability to immediately collate raw data into a graph or format a stream of text has become invaluable for workers who might have spent an afternoon completing that task before.
Twenty-three per cent said “It saves me hours of research,” while 15 per cent said “AI helps break down complex topics and barriers to education”.
Others were very optimistic about breakthroughs in sectors like healthcare, with 12 per cent saying it will “bring forward decades of discoveries”.
But there are major risks in giving artificial intelligence the keys to your job.
AI has a tendency to lean towards “impressing” its user as opposed to getting everything correct. These “hallucinations” are when an AI system generates information that sounds confident and plausible, but is sometimes entirely fabricated.
Just like a drunk man at the pub trying to impress a woman, AI is competing for your attention and can very often make things up in the heat of the “conversation”.
As long as it sounds plausible, things can easily blend into the background.
The self-cannibalising paradox
If you’re a hard-nosed money man in a senior white collar position, chances are you think AI is a godsend. At your fingertips, you have a supercomputer capable of doing your yearly figures in a heartbeat. If you’re a business owner, the temptation to automate your entire enterprise is enticing. You could even run the numbers through AI and salivate as ChatGPT predicts bumper profits once you lay off your entry-level staff.
But who’s going to use your service if nobody’s got an income to pay you with? This is one of the million questions governments have to address immediately as we roll through the early stages of the AI era. Some predict a widespread “Jobkeeper” type scenario with radical tax reform, eventually restructuring society so that those who don’t own a profitable business can survive.
But anyone who saw how that worked in Covid-19 will tell you that “solution” is laced with its own problems.
It seems not everyone is keen to join the digital bread line.
Creatives hate it most
For now, creatives appear to be the worst hit. There is now a low-cost option when purchasing “creative” work, and businesses all across the country have demonstrated they aren’t shy about outsourcing artistic work to the robot.
AI companies are leaning towards a world where the band on their stereo, the art on their wall and the book in their hand all originated from a data centre.
Platforms like Suno, Sora and OpenAI’s image generator have put a very uneasy wind up anyone who strums a guitar, operates a camera or wields a paintbrush as their life’s work.
The issue is that no matter what, all AI “creative” content is derivative. All it does is take millions of real human examples to spit out an amalgamation in record time.
The Tilly Norwood controversy summed it up earlier this month, as creatives rallied against an AI company’s shameless attempt to make actors redundant by replacing them with robots who don’t need bathroom breaks.
It tells you all you need to know about which direction we’re headed.
And now millions are quickly realising that their life might feel the same in a few short years as well.
Thoughts? alexander.blair@news.com.au
Originally published as New figures show rapidly increasing amount of Australians are fed up with AI and say it will force ‘extinction’
