AI experts think everyone uses AI all the time. We don’t.
A new Pew Research survey sheds some light on how Americans think about AI.
If you live in Silicon Valley, and spend a lot of time listening to tech CEOs, it may seem that everyone in America is using AI for everything all the time.
But a new survey by Pew Research shows that a lot of Americans only use it every once and a while.
In a revealing question, AI experts were asked how often they thought Americans used AI in their daily lives. A whopping 79% of these “AI experts” were totally sure that regular Americans were using AI “almost constantly” (several times per day).
But in fact, less than one-third of survey respondents said they used AI that much. And one-third of people said they had never used a chatbot at all.
That’s quite a misread of how people are using this new technology, which Big Tech is pouring literally hundreds of billions of dollars into without a solid business model yet.
And when it comes to how helpful AI actually is to people, only one-third of non-AI experts who had used a chatbot found it extremely or very useful. Half of this group said it was “somehwat useful,” while 21% said it didn’t help them much at all.
The survey was conducted in August 2024 and included 5,410 people. Pew defined “AI experts” as “individuals who demonstrate expertise via their work or research in artificial intelligence or related fields” and who were based in the US.
One thing that both the AI experts and normies agreed on: they are more worried that there will be not enough government regulation of AI than too much.
It remains to be seen if AI leaders — who are building massive AI infrastructure around the world to satisfy demand — have a good grasp on how regular people will use this technology.
