Abstract
Despite the increasingly important role that artificial intelligence (AI) plays in society, its social representation remains underexplored. This study reveals that AI is asymmetrically stereotyped, being more closely associated with socially dominant groups. This conclusion is based on these investigations of AI's associations along the warmth-competence dimensions of the stereotype content model, its connections with socially advantaged (e.g., men, young, rich, white) versus disadvantaged (e.g., women, old, poor, non-white) demographic groups, and its perceived impact on high- versus low-prestige occupations. Across four studies using language-based analyses with static word embeddings, BERT-based models, and GPT-4o, as well as human-participant experiment validation, it is found that i) AI is strongly associated with high competence but exhibits variability in the warmth dimension (Study 1); ii) AI is more closely linked to advantaged demographic groups (Study 2); iii) advantaged demographic groups are semantically closer to AI than their disadvantaged counterparts along the warmth-competence dimensions (Study 3); and iv) high-prestige occupations (rather than low-prestige ones) are associated more strongly with AI's benefits than with its threats. Together, these findings indicate that public perceptions of AI are systematically biased toward socially dominant groups, potentially reinforcing existing social inequalities and raising concerns about an emerging "AI divide."