60% of Americans Use AI for Search, Only 37% for Workplace Tasks, New Poll Finds (apnews.com)
- Reference: 0178505232
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/07/29/1721245/60-of-americans-use-ai-for-search-only-37-for-workplace-tasks-new-poll-finds
- Source link: https://apnews.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-poll-229b665d10d057441a69f56648b973e1
The survey of 1,437 adults, conducted July 10-14, reveals a significant generational gap in AI adoption. Among adults under 30, 74% use AI for information searches and 62% for generating ideas, compared to just 23% of those over 60 who use it for brainstorming. About one-third of Americans use AI for writing emails, creating or editing images, or entertainment purposes. A quarter use it for shopping, while 16% report using AI for companionship -- a figure that rises to 25% among younger adults.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-poll-229b665d10d057441a69f56648b973e1
Ave Q: The Internet is for Porn (Score:5, Funny)
I am absolutely sure that at least 10% of AI usage is for porn.
Write a story where gets ed by , at .
Re:Ave Q: The Internet is for Porn (Score:4, Funny)
maybe Visa/MC should say something about that
"Use AI for search"... of their own volition? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or are they "using AI for search" because all of the major search providers just stick that summary at the top of every page of results?
Re:"Use AI for search"... of their own volition? (Score:4, Insightful)
Or are they "using AI for search" because all of the major search providers colossally suck at netting results that aren't ads? You know... kinda like how Google used to function.
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That’s the real issue here I think, google and co will do to ai that they did to search.. you’ll get a response alright, right after this ads or integrated into the text of the response.. in fact it will probably end up that you’ll get paid responses.. like.. you ask it what’s a good product for x and it will tell you about how much better Kia is than Lamborghini this all will be tied into social media activity too.. it will start insisting that the only ethical neutering involves ne
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> the new war will be about who can produce the most ideologically correct ai.
Thats the hilarious thing about Grok and other AI models that have been trained on factual content and told not to hallucinate, they cannot make sense of having a far right viewpoint wrapped onto them while still adhering to factual reality because the connection simply isn’t real. It has no rational justification possible, likely because one simply does not exist in any possible form. AI don’t yet understand how to fear monger the masses because they cannot think and rationalize on the level n
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no choice is a choice...
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Mmmhmm.
I don't want the AI response. It's wrong often enough that I can't trust it even if it happens to be right.
But the high point of Internet search was altavista.digital.com, so I guess I don't expect much anymore.
Re: (Score:3)
Summary implies it's a choice, as you mention, search engines like google now promote their AI summary over linking to actual sites/articles -- so I guess I'm "using" AI for search but it's the default behavior of the the browser, not an active/conscious action on my part.
Probably just another way for AI pushers (looking for funding etc) to say "look at the adoption rate!", it's not really an adoption rate if there's no choice though.
I've been using the &udm=14 add to the querystring to turn it off when
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I might skim the AI summary but unless I’m looking for documentation I know exists and it’s approximate form I’ve found the AI results disastrously wrong and inaccurate at least half the time but looking kinda right visually and sounding kind of plausible. Just one in a hundred would make it almost unusable, 50% isn’t even useful. So at best I have to double check with a search engine even if it’s right making it a waste of time. It really doesn’t even depend on the m
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That was my exact first thought! That's how I "use" it - if the summary found the right thing, I follow that link. Which is usually one of the top results anyway, so sometimes I click the link there.
Which just means I'm using a search engine, not that I'm "using AI".
I did once use an AI to generate a logo for an in-game corporation. I didn't like the results I got, so I used one from a mod pack instead.
"X4: Foundations" was the game, should you be curious.
Re: "Use AI for search"... of their own volition? (Score:2)
You're probably right. Just like big companies claim their devs write X% of code using AI while all they do is use an AI-enabled IDE.
It's an illusion created to excite investors, make them flock to the greatest adopters in the name of illusionary gains from an illusionary tech.
Defaults are important (Score:3)
If I search anything on Bing on my Windows laptop, I get an AI result as the first result. The same with the Android phone. I may not like it - it takes effort not to use AI.
AI can't do much for work yet (Score:4)
Try this:
Open up an Excel sheet. Ask it to highlight all zip codes int eh western US. Or, ask it to make a pivot table for you. Good luck. It just tells you how to do it, it won't actually *do* it.
If AI could do this sort of thing, I'd be all in. It's not there yet.
If you just need text of some sort, it's fine. I use it for that. Things like "Make a job description for a SQL developer." It's pretty good at that stuff. But until it can actually automate tasks, it's going to be a hard sell for companies to spring for the steep licensing costs.
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That would be useful. And the sort of thing I'd want it for. Do the regex and field matching for me, or get out of the way.
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If I search in google for "job description for a sql developer -ai" then the top result is [1]this [revelo.com]. That's information that's curated by an actual human being who knows what the job entails. And I got there really fast. Why would I want to take the extra time to get an LLM to generate the content for me when I know that it's likely to hallucinate the wrong information? Seriously, LLMs are for people who are too stupid to use a search engine effectively, which I am sorry to learn is a lot of people.
[1] https://www.revelo.com/job-description/sql-developer#:~:text=SQL%20Developer%20Responsibilities&text=Designing%2C%20developing%2C%20and%20maintaining%20databases,and%20resolving%20database-related%20issues
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But, with your Google search, say you find a nice job description for a SQL developer. Now, you want to add items related to performance tuning, and remove items related to backup and restore. With AI, you can simply follow up with amendments like that, and it will helpfully make the updates. With your web search, you have to either start over, or make the changes manually.
This is admittedly a trivial use case. Some use cases for spitting out text are more involved, and therefore more useful when done by AI
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It can do this. You need to look at agents.
You have to give them the keys.. but they will drive.
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Sure, you're looking at agents with steep license fees. Most companies aren't ready to pay those (yet). Or, agents with of questionable origins, or that don't comply with HIPAA or GDPR or other regulations that your company might have to comply with.
I was referring to the Copilot AI that comes with Excel, not additional software that you have to buy.
Re:AI can't do much for work yet (Score:5, Insightful)
> AI can't do much for work yet (Score:5)
Before you mod me down, please consider this. Most of us still on Slashdot are old geezers. We are here because old habits die hard. And, as we age, many of us become reluctant to change. I use AI daily for work. It is a tool, like many others. But more complicated than anything we have seen in quite a long time. It takes a lot of work to get good at it. Throwing a few random prompts at it will produce disappointing results. But once you do get good at it, the results are exceptionally good.
Few of us are programming in assembly or zeros and ones. Many of us have moved from programming in lower level languages to higher level languages. We are getting close to a point when English becomes the new higher level language. Still, not everybody will become a great programmer overnight. Asking good questions, even in plain English requires skill and intelligence. Garbage in/Garbage out rules still apply.
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It's not black and white.
English won't become a programming language. If it were, we would already be using other no-code solutions that were advertised as the future.
Each time something no-code gets big, people want a more efficient way than English or stacking some blocks together and if you invent a concise syntax you end up with a programming language.
But English can be a good language to instruct your tools. Did you ever think "If I could only tell the IDE what to do instead of searching for minutes in
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Yep, I don't disagree. I'm 59, I supposed that's "old." I too use AI every day, but I also find it disappointing in some way, every day. GitHub Copilot, for example, _really_ struggles to add new code in the proper place. Ask it to refactor a function, for example, it's likely to place the new function inside the old one, rather than replace the old one with the new one. Or it doesn't bother to add header or using references, or other stupid stuff. It's useful, yes, but you have to work hard to make it real
I use it for search and also... (Score:2)
...for tech support
Whether it's looking for information in a software manual or a chip data sheet, I can usually find the answer quicker by using perplexity
Not much of a digital turk (Score:2)
My AI use has devolved into natural language searches. It provides patently wrong information more often than not when used beyond that capacity.
Since I have to validate its answers, I might as well just search for information the "old fashioned" way - it at least keeps my brain sharp.
100% using it for search means some avoid it (Score:2)
Considering that all the major search services force AI into your face when you use them, any number under 100% of people saying they use AI for search means that many people are purposely avoiding it. Also look closely at the actual questions asked. Any response other than "never" is counted as "uses AI for " even though one of the responses is "less than several times a week". Another article probably written by an AI proponent intended to play up the user base.
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This was a survey? I figured it would be a report based on usage. Like how a search engine knows if you clicked a link in the AI summary or in the results.
Just goes to show how important it can be to read the 2nd paragraph...
Don't tell anyone how lazy I was, ok?
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Haha - it literally says "new poll finds" in the title of the story. You didn't even read to the end of the title :P :) ;)
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Sshhhh! I said don't tell!
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Oops - I didn't notice that /. filtered the "Less than" symbol I put at the start of the post's title, so its meaning was lost.
60% for search? (Score:2)
> 60% of American adults use AI to search for information,
Because the search results are not overly contaminated into uselessness by "ad buys" so look for that to go away in the next three to six months. Not to worry, it will turn into just another Google Search in the coupon book when a dictionary is required very soon.
The only reason... (Score:2)
...that use is even as high as it is is that google shoved their, often wrong, AI summary into the top slot on searches by default. I wouldnt necessarily call the current AI landscape a fad, there's plenty of good uses for LLMs, but the current trend of "shove AI into everything" feels a lot like the whole "shove blockchain into everything" trend from a few years back but a lot bigger, and I think people are kinda getting sick of it
AI searches (Score:2)
> 60% of Americans Use AI for Search, Only 37% for Workplace Tasks, New Poll Finds
AI searches are generally better than the normal Google searches but the AI answers are still pretty full of shit for less mainstream topics. If you are searching for anything niche like medieval history, latin inscriptions, details on WWII aircraft engines, rare diseases ... the AI will very confidently serve you up a big steaming pile of complete bullsiht. If they ever fix that problem Google had better watch out because their AI sucks balls.
AI not good when accuracy matters (Score:2)
AI and similar not-quite-AI automation is pretty good at finding entertaining might be true information but is often a hindrance when exact accurate results are needed. Guess what? Work needs exact accurate results.
Fundamental lack of trust (Score:5, Insightful)
What AI spits out is fundamentally worthless because it can't be trusted. If I can't depend on a tool to provide me with trusted knowledge/solution to my problem, the tool has absolutely bo value to me.
Only... (Score:2)
Assuming these numbers are correct, I don't think 37% is a small percentage, given how recent AI tools are. Even less if you think that there are still several careers and job positions which aren't really touched by it.
IDENTICAL rates (Score:2)
Not everyone works. The labor force participation rate is 62.3% as of June. Well, guess what? 62.3% or 60% is 37%. So, the rates of use are identical.
Re: (Score:2)
that's supposed to read "62.3% OF 60% ..."
How do they know this for sure? (Score:2)
Sure, 60% of Americans use AI for search. Because the search engines default to it now. There is literally no way to turn it off. You Google something, you get "Gemni." They also stealth activated Gemni on Android phones as the standard "Assistant" and I had to jump through hoops to turn that off.
See [1]here [wired.com]. Yeah, it's a year old but it's still true.
For Google, I almost always click on the "web" tab as soon as it generates the AI slop, so Google does what it used to do in the first place. The results are far
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/google-ai-overviews-how-to-use-how-to-turn-off/
if I used AI for search (Score:2)
My apologies, I didn't intend to.
Assumption (Score:5, Informative)
This summary seems to assume that AI adoption is a good thing. There's ample evidence that claims of productivity increases are overblown and mostly hype. And the energy consumption that AI systems use is really, really high. Maybe lower adoption rates is a good thing? I learned recently that you can put "-ai" at the end of your Google query and it stops it from including AI summaries in your search results. The bonus? It's much faster.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd like to see more examples of realistic use-cases. Yes, it can guess-write code, write rough drafts of company content or guess-answer questions on it (when trained on company content), guess data form entries, guess-automate keyboard sequences, but what else?
Re:Assumption (Score:4, Insightful)
It can give me wrong answers when I ask it basic questions about ham radio equipment.
I was curious if an older mobile radio from Yaesu could receive the FM commercial broadcast band. It told me it could in the generic Google search AI field that I never asked for. When I found the Yaesu manual, Yaesu said that model could not.
I suspect that because the radio can receive 108MHz+, and the commercial band stops at 108MHz, it was conflating the two rather than seeing 108MHz as a boundary, but regardless of why it was getting the answer wrong.
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The number one use case is to write high school essays and otherwise cheat on homework.
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One area where I find AI useful is in automated transcription and summarizing of Teams meetings.
Unfortunately, the trend in my company is to move various discussions from e-mail to Teams threads, or - even worse, IMO - to various meetings over Teams. This is principally driven by younger generation folks, who seem to think e-mail is too old-fashioned, despite Teams having the worst UI and usage model I have ever seen. This particular rant aside, AI integrated with Teams has done a lot to alleviate the pain
Re:Assumption (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it even being adopted or are all of the major search providers desperately shoving it down everyone's throats to make the numbers look better for investors who may otherwise balk at the billions poured into the AI money pit?
Re: (Score:2)
This. Its actually only used becuase Bing made it the first button on the left which used to be the default full text search results. And Google counts every search that their AI could stumble through because they display it at the top of the page, whether you wanted it or not.
Re: Assumption (Score:2)
Of course not. It creates an illusion of knowledge. Makes ignorant people look smarter. Appearing smarter rather than learning something is definitely not a good thing.