At high risk (for a ban)? The impact of citizen trust in public authorities and trust in AI on the demand for stricter AI regulations in the field of public security

AI is increasingly used in the public sector, including the area of public security. Application areas include predictive policing or bail setting. Such use cases in which people are affected can have significant implications that must be taken seriously. Therefore, it is essential to ensure that such systems are developed in the public interest, which means that any technology that will be deployed for the public has to be under close examination (Züger & Ashgari, 2022). While there is broad consensus among business leaders, policymakers, and scientists that AI must be developed in an ethical and trustworthy manner (Jobin et al., 2019), scholars have argued that ethical guidelines do not guarantee ethical AI, but rather prevent stronger regulation of AI in the sense of the common good (Hagendorff, 2020). As a possible counterweight, public opinion, on the other hand, can have a decisive influence on policymakers (e.g., through voters demands) to establish a clearer legal framework. Though we know little about the conditions, which leads to regulatory demand of AI systems. In this study, we focus on the role of trust in AI as well as trust in the public authorities that deploy AI as potential factors that may lead to demands for regulation of AI technology. Furthermore, our research model includes the explanatory variables of AI literacy and the beliefs in AI capabilities as well as political values and perceived issue severity as control variables. We will conduct a survey among German citizens to empirically assess our research model. The paper discusses implications for researchers, policymakers and citizens.