Left-leaning media outlets are more skeptical of artificial intelligence than right-leaning outlets, a new study shows, which could make a significant difference in voters' attitudes toward military and government use of AI—as well as how those technologies are regulated. 

The study, published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science in September and made public last week, looked at the way media outlets such as the Washington Post, CNN, the New York Post, and The Wall Street Journal, discussed AI, paying particular attention to specific sentiment tags to determine whether the coverage was positive or negative. The authors found "that liberal-leaning media show a higher aversion to AI than conservative-leaning media," they wrote. "These partisan media differences toward AI are driven by liberal-leaning media's greater concern about AI's ability to magnify societal biases."