Public Perception and Adoption of Artificial Intelligence in Digital Media: A Quantitative Survey Analysis

Counts differ because each database indexes a different set of publications. We treat OpenAlex as the canonical count; Google Scholar is not shown (no API, and crawling it violates its ToS).

This paper presents a quantitative analysis of a structured survey administered to 300 respondents as part of a doctoral study examining the transformative effects of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on digital media. The survey captured respondent demographics, digital media consumption habits, familiarity with and use of AI tools, and perceptions of AI's influence on content creation, journalism, trust, personalisation, and regulation. Findings indicate near-universal familiarity with AI (89.0% at least somewhat familiar), high adoption of AI tools (48.7% daily users), and broad agreement that AI has reduced content-production time (88.3%) and improved creative output (81.0%). At the same time, respondents expressed considerable ambivalence about trust: only 8.0% said they would completely trust an AI-generated news article, while 88.7% agreed that AI-generated news could increase misinformation. A large majority (88.3%) supported stricter regulation of AI-generated media, and 81.0% favoured mandatory labelling of AI-generated content. These findings echo international survey evidence — the Reuters Institute's cross-national tracking has similarly found low comfort with AI-authored news alongside rapidly rising AI tool adoption (Simon et al., 2025) — while extending that picture to an Indian, largely Meerut-and-NCR-based sample. The data point to a public that is enthusiastic about AI's productivity benefits while simultaneously anxious about authenticity, misinformation, and privacy — a duality that this paper terms the 'adoption-anxiety paradox.' The findings are intended to complement a parallel qualitative study of digital media professionals conducted for the same doctoral project.