TTU research says 49% of people fear losing their job to AI - fox34.com

Austin Lee, an assistant professor of journalism and creative media industries at Texas Tech, launched the survey years before ChatGPT existed. Back then, he asked a random selection of people across the country how afraid they were of things like heights, spiders, and artificial intelligence. AI barely registered. Most people's daily contact with the technology amounted to Siri or Alexa, nothing that felt like a threat to a paycheck.

Lee's team tracked the fear climbing alongside public awareness of AI tools, showing how quickly the technology moved from novelty to something people worry about at their kitchen table. For a university that trains journalists and media professionals, the finding lands close to home, given how much AI has already reshaped those industries.

For people in Lubbock, the numbers matter beyond campus. Jobs in retail, media, customer service, and plenty of other fields have all felt some version of this shift, and Lee's research puts a hard number on a worry a lot of workers already carry around quietly. It is not abstract anymore.

Nine years ago almost nobody feared a robot taking their job. Now it is a coin flip.