I recently wrote that trust is best built on accountability, specifically in reference to advertisers’ growing comfort in using AI tools and receptiveness of being near AI-generated content.
But accountability can hardly be considered the foundational building block that explains generative AI’s more general, breakneck rise. Yet, here we are, seeing a rapid adoption that one new study is finding to be more speedy and drastic than even the internet or the personal computer before it.
As The Decoder reports, “the study … found that generative AI reached usage rates in two years that took PCs and the Internet more than five years to achieve.”
(Source: The Rapid Adoption of Generative AI)
With data from the Real-Time Population Survey (RPS), the study, entitled The Rapid Adoption of Generative AI, found a 39.5% adoption rate for generative AI after two years. Contrasted to internet’s 20% over that same time and PC’s 20% after three years, generative AI’s faster adoption is “likely because of differences in portability and cost.”
“Generative AI may be adopted more rapidly because it targets consumers rather than firms,” the study says. “[Any] gaps by firm size are far too small to explain the discrepancy between firm and worker usage, suggesting that workers are using generative AI even in firms that haven’t officially adopted it.”
The study found that writing communications was considered the most useful AI task, both at work (38.4%) and outside of work (26.8%). Performing administrative tasks and summarizing or interpreting text were the next two most useful tasks at work, all culminating in what the study estimates to be 0.5% and 3.5% of all work hours currently being assisted by generative AI.
“Assuming that the productivity gains from recent experimental studies are externally valid, this suggests that generative AI could plausibly increase labor productivity 20 by between 0.125 and 0.875 percentage points at current levels of usage,” the study calculates, albeit cautiously due to certain assumptions and speculations. “It will be important to track the adoption of generative AI as the technology matures and to monitor whether its usage expands broadly across workers, firms, and occupations.”
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