Artificial intelligence is becoming an increasingly visible part of our lives, and with it comes talk of a new wave of anxiety. We worry about losing our jobs, about the security of our personal data, about not being able to keep up with new technologies, and about how far the development of AI may ultimately go.

All of these concerns are often grouped under a single expression — “AI anxiety.” However, a new study suggests that this label hides different kinds of worries that may arise independently of one another.

Researchers from the Universities of Pisa and Bergen developed a special scale called AISAS, designed to measure stress and anxiety related to AI. The work consisted of two preregistered studies conducted among adults in the United Kingdom. The samples were constructed to reflect the country’s population in terms of age, sex, and ethnicity.

The first study involved 301 participants. Their responses helped identify four main types of concern:

• worries related to work and the possible loss of professional relevance;
• stress caused by the need to learn how to use AI and adapt to new technologies;
• anxiety about privacy and the use of personal data;
• existential questions, including the possible emergence of consciousness in artificial intelligence.

A second study involving 324 participants confirmed that this structure also appeared in another sample.

These findings reveal an important distinction. We may use AI tools comfortably and have no difficulty learning how they work, while still being seriously concerned about the data they collect. Or the opposite may be true: we may not be especially worried about privacy, but feel that our profession is under threat. That is why the general question “Are you afraid of artificial intelligence?” oversimplifies the range of possible reactions.

The most common concerns among participants were related to privacy. By contrast, stress about having to learn and adapt to AI was relatively uncommon. This does not entirely match the image of a society universally frightened by the rapid development of new technologies.

But it would be misleading to treat the study as evidence of a new “anxiety epidemic.” The authors’ main goal was to create and preliminarily validate a measurement tool, not to determine how many people are experiencing psychological problems because of AI. The study also does not show that artificial intelligence itself caused the concerns that were observed.

The new scale also has limitations. The component related to stress from adapting to AI consists of only two items and cannot yet be regarded as a fully developed subscale. In addition, both validation studies were conducted only in the United Kingdom. It is not known whether the same structure of concerns would appear in countries with different attitudes toward technology, labor markets, and data protection rules.

The scale is not intended for diagnosis. But it may help future research speak more precisely about our relationship with artificial intelligence. Instead of a broad and alarming concept of “AI anxiety,” it becomes possible to ask what exactly we are worried about: losing our jobs, losing control over personal information, having to constantly retrain, or a future in which the boundary between human and artificial becomes increasingly unclear.

Source: Enrico Cipriani, Hanna Joy Justesen, Danilo Menicucci & Simone Grassini. “The AI stress and anxiety scale (AISAS): development, initial validation and insight on the diffusion of AI-related stress and anxiety”, Scientific Reports, 2026