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Almost a supermajority of Americans use AI at least multiple times a week. Let me know how you want to pay up.
I found this study absolutely impossible to believe; I'm a Millennial who's on the internet way too much and have been since the early 90s, and I've never used AI.
But then I remembered that Google force-feeds you an AI answer when you use the search bar the same way you've been doing for 30 years. So, touché. I'll still defend the fact that it's not something that most people go out of their way to intentionally engage with.
Almost half of Americans use chatbots specifically, with about a quarter doing so daily.
Really?? Again, maybe I'm not thinking broadly enough about what "AI" is defined as. I suppose it would include things like Alexa/Google Home/Siri? We called those "voice assistants" in my day.
I wasn't even hearing the term "A.I." as anything other than the movie (or Allen Iverson) in any remotely mainstream sense, unless post-Covid.
Well, no, those are not chatbots.
Huh? The prominence of the AI boom is largely a post Covid phenomenon.
Ok, well then my point is that I can't think of any other technology in history that has achieved 50 percent market penetration in 3-4 years. I just checked Google Trends for both "A.I" and "LLM", and they both start to take off in early 2023, which was about how I remembered when I first started hearing about them.
So, when I say "A.I", I mean specifically utilizing Claude/ChatGPT/Gemini/etc. HALF of Americans are doing this weekly? My circle must just be in the stone age, then, because I still know multiple people who don't own computers.
Smartphones themselves were about 6 years to reach 50% of US adults.
Most normies I see using those apps are doing speech to text on their phone to get approximately the functionality I expected from a basic google search on a desktop 5-10 years ago, back when google would just understand what I was probably looking for and put that info right onto the search results screen.
I mentioned previous in this thread to the parent comment: I'm not sure we're both using "A.I" in the same way. Speech-to-text functionality? I completely believe that half of people use that. He told me that Siri/Alexa/Google Home were not "A.I", so I struggle to see how speech-to-text (a far older technology) qualifies.
For clarification: when I say "A.I.", I am referring to Claude/Gemini/ChatGPT LLMs, accessed with intention, likely with a paid subscription (at least if the user has any seriousness).
Sorry, I don't mean they're using the ChatGPT app solely as a form of speech-to-text, I mean that the usual use case is something like rambling at their phone for 30s to find out the business hours of a local store. AFAIKS, the median "AI user" is just treating it like a Siri app that someone said was better. Admittedly, they also use it for image generation, hence the QR code issue I mentioned elsewhere.
All of them stop when the free version rate limits them.
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What did you think takeoff meant? Vibes? Papers?
That's when GPT-4 hit the public imagination.
Yes!
About 9% of American adults don't have a smartphone, so sure, it's not out of the question that you know several of them.
I don't know what you mean by this, unless it's an "exponential adoption curve spurred by the inevitable singularity"-type of way, which I don't want to assume.
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Well… while I agree that the figure of one-in-four Americans using LLMs daily, or half weekly, is very hard to believe (I would love to see a breakdown of who exactly responded to that survey and how the data was weighted), I think you might indeed know some real stone age outliers.
Are you including smartphones and tablets in your definition of “computer”? If yes, then not only do I not know anyone who doesn’t own a computer, I don’t think I know anyone who knows anyone who doesn’t own a computer. And that’s including my elderly relatives and their circles, friends who have family from third-world countries, etc. If not and you just mean desktops/laptops, then I can at least think of my 92-year-old grandmother, who never bothered learning to use a computer when they were new and only reluctantly accepted a gifted tablet from my parents around a decade ago. But that’s about it.
Agreed, I can't help but question the methodology of this poll, if only in the sense that it might outrank any other poll in terms of dissonance between its assertions versus personal observations.
Certainly. Pretty much any internet-accessible device is a computer, in my mind. Hell the TI-84+ has an argument to make.
Beyond that: yes I have a very old soul, as well as relatives who typically live into their 90s. So I'm sure that skews my perspective on the technological adoption curve.
But I still don't believe that half of Americans are intentionally accessing LLMs or generative A.I. Not even close.
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