Like many new parents, I devote considerable time to thinking about sleep and why it’s not happening. Should I have sung the bedtime song and then changed the diaper? Did the baby need a fourth nap, or was the mistake letting her take a third so close to bedtime? It came as a surprise the other day, then, when a fellow parent in my baby group revealed she isn’t overthinking the whole sleep schedule thing at all. “I asked ChatGPT to write my baby’s sleep plan,” she told us. “It’s validating!”
To this author, personally, outsourcing parenting decisions to the world’s most sophisticated Mad Libs respondent seems like one of the signs that we’re doomed. Sleepmaxxing mothers aside, a plurality of Americans agree with me. Per Heatmap Pro’s latest polling, 45% of voters are “pessimistic” about the long-term impact of artificial intelligence on their lives, with just 22% saying they’re “optimistic” and about a third saying they’re unsure.
Americans were even more negative about the perceived impacts of AI on “society as a whole” — more than half, 55%, said they were pessimistic, while just 17% said they were optimistic. Maybe “future generations” will have it better? Eh. Again, net pessimism outweighed optimism in our polling by more than 30 points (52% to 20%).
Look a little closer at who hates their life because of AI and you might be surprised. The youngest respondents in the survey (and those who will have to live with the tech the longest), were by far the biggest doubters. Respondents aged 18 to 34 reported the most pessimism of any major demographic about the estimated impact of AI on their personal lives, tied with women generally at net 33 pessimistic over optimistic. For AI’s impact on society as a whole, there was a 53-point spread in favor of AI making things worse (68% pessimistic to 15% optimistic), which is 15 points worse than the next most pessimistic age group, the 35- to 49-year-olds.
Seniors, by contrast, are a little more sanguine. Among the 65-and-over crowd, the pessimism gap was a comparatively small net 12. In fact, men over the age of 65 were the only major group to report being more optimistic than pessimistic on AI’s impacts on future generations (34% to 30%) and on their own lives (35% to 32%). By contrast, young women were among the most negative of all groups; nearly three in four women in the 18 to 34 range (73%) said they were pessimistic about AI’s impact on society, and the same group was net 62 under water on AI’s effects on future generations. (Our findings are in keeping with other polls that show a gender gap on the embrace of AI.)
Education, surprisingly, wasn’t a big difference-maker. People who attended college reported nearly identical pessimism about AI’s impacts on society and future generations as non-college-educated respondents. College-educated people were just a few points less pessimistic about AI’s impact on their own lives, 25% versus 29% for those who didn’t attend.
So who actually thinks AI is going to be a good thing? Black respondents were at least more evenly divided on the impact of AI on their personal lives (33% optimistic to 33% pessimistic), though they were less convinced that the technology is good for society or future generations (13 points net pessimistic). People who prefer a hands-off federal approach to AI are generally encouraged by the technology’s application in their own lives, at net 13 optimistic. But even the most AI-friendly group’s outlook dropped off when considering its implications on society as a whole (net 4 pessimistic) and on future generations (net zero).
Independent voters bristled more at AI’s impacts on their lives (pessimism net 32) than Democrats (net 30), and on the question of “society as a whole,” the bloc ran away with net pessimism of 48, compared to Democrats (net 45) and Republicans (net 27). Among Republicans, MAGA voters were net 25 toward pessimism about AI’s impacts on their lives — in spite of President Trump’s boosterism — compared with the even-more-pessimistic non-MAGA voters at net 34 pessimistic.
Are Americans just a half-glass-empty group to begin with? Well, maybe — the percentage of adults who told Gallup they anticipate having “high-quality lives in five years” declined to less than 60% in 2025, the lowest level in two decades of polling. And while this is Heatmap’s first year tracking AI optimism, in Stanford University’s 2025 Artificial Intelligence Index Report, an adjacent line of inquiry found that people are increasingly warming up to the technology, with the “share of individuals who see AI products and services as more beneficial than harmful [rising] from 52% in 2022 to 55% in 2024.”
At the same time, about a third of Americans in our polling worried that AI puts their jobs at risk; a mere 6% said they believe that “AI will create jobs across the country, and I expect my own career to benefit.” Hopefully, there are no baby sleep trainers among their numbers.
The Heatmap Pro poll of 4,118 American registered voters was conducted by Embold Research via text-to-web responses from May 15 to 28, 2026. The survey included interviews with Americans in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 1.6 percentage points.
Lights out in Cuba. Magdalena Chodownik/Anadolu via Getty Images
