this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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Users will flood back in the next few week when school comes back. I'd like to see another breakdown in December.
It's addressed in the article. First, use started to decline in April, before school was out. Second, only 23 percent of prompts were related to education, which includes both homework type prompts, and personal/professional knowledge seeking. Only about 10 percent was strictly homework. So school work isn't a huge slice of ChatGPTs use.
Combine that with schools cracking down on kids using ChatGPT (in classroom assignments and tests, etc), and I don't think your going to see a major bounce back in traffic when school starts. Maybe a little.
I'm starting to think generative AI might be a bit of a fad. Personally I was very excited about it and used ChatGPT, Bing, and Bard all the time. But over time I realized they just weren't very good, inaccurate answers, bland writing, just not much help to me, a non programmer. I still use them, but now it's maybe once a day or less, not all day like I used to. Generative AI seems more like a tool that is helpful in some limited cases, not the major transformation it felt like early in the year. Who knows, maybe they'll get better and more useful.
Also, not super related, but I saw a static the other day that only about a third of the US has even tried ChatGPT. It feels like a huge thing to us tech nerdy people, but your average person hasn't bothered to even try it out.
People had a huge surge of interest in it at first because they wanted to know what it was about, it was fascinating and exciting especially exploring it's limits and playing around - it was fun spending hours just messing with it. The numbers are bound to drop as the novelty wears off, the amount of people actually using it to get stuff done might still be going up even if numbers fall by half.
Certainly some teachers fear new technology but most realize that they have to teach the kids to live in the world the kids will be growing up into not the would the teacher grew up into. Teachers will be educating kids on how to use it as a research tool, on how to use it in projects, in how to use it to improve writing quality - we will be eventually see more kids getting marked down with 'chatGPT could have helped reword this' than we see 'this is written too well you must have used modern tools to help'
Not that I have any faith in teachers being sensible, when I was at school they wouldn't accept typed homework on the premise 'when you get a job your boss isn't going to allow you to type up your work' and I'm only talking about the mid 90's here lol
Really though I think most people are going to be interacting with LLMs via tools built into other things - it'll be one of those things we only really notice when it's annoying. Daily use will be things like being able to refine searches when online shopping 'I need a plug for my bath' returning a selection of bath plugs rather than electrical connectors, music by the bang plug, and pluggano pasta. Especially when it can show a selection then refine it by saying 'like that but in pink' or even ask it 'what's the difference between these two' and it says 'this is three dollars and made from a softer material for a more effective seal'
This is still year one. I think it’s way too early to infer a trend which may well be cyclical not linear. I’d hardly say nail in the coffin for the theory.