Adult Learners’ Perceptions of Artificial Intelligence: Affordances and Concerns

As artificial intelligence (AI) enters adult education, understanding how adult learners themselves perceive the technology is essential for designing effective AI readiness training. This study analyzed open-ended responses from 547 adult learners enrolled at a Centre for Adult Education in Flanders (Belgium). They were asked to describe what they saw as the positive and negative aspects of AI. Inductive coding identified four positive and five negative themes. Positive perceptions clustered around individual-level, instrumental affordances, particularly work efficiency and learning enhancement. Negative perceptions, by contrast, extended beyond operational limitations to ethical and societal registers, such as Ethical concern and Micro-societal threats. These findings extend the evidence by showing that adult learners not only recognize instrumental benefits of AI but also raise civic, professional, and ecological concerns.