Mapping policymakers’ and laypeople’s perceptions of genAI and FPT

The recently enforced EU AI Act has advanced the state of AI regulation and is largely perceived as a valuable step toward regulating AI. Nevertheless, some articles of the AI Act remain contested and raise societal concerns, highlighting that the AI Act’s aim to support the development of trustworthy AI is a continuous endeavor, also in terms of discourse with society. Two highly discussed AI application areas with great impact on societies worldwide are facial processing technologies (FPT) and generative AI (genAI). For a socially sustainable regulatory approach, discourse between policymakers and citizens is important. This requires, on the one side, understanding policymakers’ general opinions on citizen participation. On the other side, there is the need to know which touchpoints and perceptions laypeople worldwide currently have with and about these AI application areas. To learn about the perceptions of both target groups, we surveyed policymakers and experts (N = 61) and laypeople (N = 1070) worldwide in late 2023. Combining these two exploratory survey studies allowed us to identify key topics that are relevant to policymakers and citizens to inform policy processes in light of the EU AI Act and beyond. In the context of a larger research project, the results serve as a foundation for designing a citizen deliberation process on FPT and genAI across continents. In this short paper, we motivate and contextualize our research, present our research approach, and describe the first results.