Men Are More Likely to Overstate Their Knowledge of AI, Harvard Study Finds

Summary

A new Harvard survey of more than 5,400 Americans examines how gender shapes confidence and uncertainty around artificial intelligence. Seventy-three percent of male respondents said they knew who OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was, while 53 percent said they recognized Mira Murati, Susan Milner, and Craig Dalton. Murati is a real former OpenAI CTO and current Thinking Machine Labs CEO, but Milner and Dalton are fictional; 40 percent of women also claimed to know the fictional names, compared with 38 percent who recognized Murati. Men reported using AI more often and answered factual questions correctly somewhat more often, but men and women gave wrong answers at roughly the same rate. The main difference was uncertainty: women said they were unsure on an average of 3.3 of 12 questions, compared with 2.3 for men. The researchers also found that men appeared in AI headlines more than 14 times as often as women, and represented three-quarters of quoted subject experts, despite women making up about 29 percent of the AI talent pool. Both genders ranked concern as their strongest emotional response to AI, but women reported more concern, fear, and worry, while men expressed more curiosity, enthusiasm, and excitement. The researchers argue that greater willingness to say “not sure” could broaden AI discussion and reduce the dominance of overly certain predictions about its future.