International survey shows lack of awareness of AI apps
Despite the hype, few people are using actually using artificial intelligence according to an international survey by Reuters Institute and Oxford University.
A survey of 12,000 people across Argentina, Denmark, France, Japan, the UK and the US, a mere 2% of those surveyed in the UK and 7% in the US use ChatGPT daily. Less than half (47%) of Americans and 42% of Britons said they had never heard of ChatGPT. The other countries also gave similar figures.
Other applications such as Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot or Elon Musk’s Grok lie are even less known.
The difference across age groups is noticeable, however: young people between the ages of 18 and 24 said they use AI more than older people. Almost two-thirds (60%) of that same demographic agreed that “generative AI will have a big impact on ordinary people in the next five years.”
AI usage was divided into two categories. Almost a quarter of respondents (24%) said they use AI to gather information and 28% to generate new media.
In the ‘information’ category, the most common use is ‘answering factual questions’ (11%). This is followed by ‘asking for advice’ (10%), and 9% of respondents use AI to generate ideas or just experiment with it.
Experimenting with it scores highest in the creative group (11%), followed by ‘write an e-mail or letter’ (9%), ‘generate an image’ (9%) and ‘write an essay or report’ (8%).
In doing so, the researchers note that generative AI is thus most commonly used for things where it is simultaneously most vulnerable. AI applications are not always reliable when it comes to facts. At the same time, for example, only 8% of those surveyed use AI tools to summarize texts, which is a strength.
So why are these numbers so low?
The majority of those surveyed think AI will make their own lives better. Whether AI will advance society as a whole is a divisive question.
There are big differences to note depending on the sector in which AI is used, explained the survey’s lead researcher, Richard Fletcher, to the BBC. “People are generally optimistic about the use of generative AI in science or healthcare. But they are concerned about its use in news and in journalism. They are also concerned about the effect on job security.”
Fletcher concludes, there is a discrepancy between the hype created by developers and users of AI on the one hand and the general public on the other. “Large parts of the public are not interested in generative AI,” he said.
This may be explained by the fear and uncertainty that still surrounds the reliability of AI in everyday tasks. Precisely because people use AI primarily in tasks in which it less helpful or accurate, the flaws stand out more.
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