Yeah, Are We Sure About AI Changing Our Lives?

When are we handing the keys to everything to a bunch of dumb bots exactly?

Has ChatGPT changed your life yet?

To be honest, I’m still waiting.

This isn’t a column aimed at debating whether AI is coming, or is already here, or to warn you about robots taking over the planet. I don’t doubt that AI technology - which is already baked into much of what software-driven businesses do, is going to have a major impact on how companies operate.

I’m talking about consumers - regular people- and whether AI tools such as conversational search and generative AI are going to have as massive an impact on society (and the ad business) as people think.

I’m not sure if I see it.

It’s true that the evidence is - let’s say - against my take.

Take my conversation with Kya Sainsbury-Carter, corporate vice president, Microsoft Advertising this week on myNext in Media podcast. Naturally, we talked about Bing, and how many users are trying out its conversational AI tools during what Sainsbury-Carter called a “major transformational moment” in the history of the web.

Since Bing adopted aspects of ChatGPT, the would be Google competitor has jumped to 100 million daily active users, and folks have conducted half a billion “chats” rather than searches.

As Sainsbury-Carter explained, people ‘get’ right away how to use AI Bing, from putting their queries in form of questions to using lots of superlatives (best tacos in Cleveland) to typing in long searches - three times as long as they do on Regular Bing.

"It’s both super interesting and not wholly unexpected,” she said. “The most interesting and important observation so far” she added, is that people are conducting lots more queries than traditional search, but getting to what they want faster - such as making a purchase.

Sounds cool. Have you switched to Bing yet? Are you shopping this way? Have you moved beyond screwing around on ChatGPT to using it every day?

It definitely seems as though the hype is calming considerably. Right after the 4th of July, you may have missed this Reuters report that Chat GPT traffic was down 10%. Hardly the end of the world for something that came out of the gate so rapidly, but also not a sign of people cementing new habits. See this not so pretty chart from Similarweb:

In my point of view (and I’m often quite wrong about these things), we over estimate how much people want to summarize and synthesize massive amounts of data and information. Think of how many searches lend themselves to quick and dirty answers (what is the phone number of that place? how many years are left on Saquon Barkley’s contract? how do you spell bureacrat? Most of us aren’t looking to write a term paper on a daily basis.

Dan Frommer of The New Consumer has some great stats on how many people are excited about AI’s impact on society - and how many are worried. In terms of actual usage - there doesn’t appear to be much.

Ok, but what about when everyone builds on ChatGPT or Bard or whatever, and the whole open web becomes land of the chatbots? That’s the vision right - that AI reorients the entirety of web presentation and navigation?

“We’re all kind of starting slow on this,” said Sainsbury-Carter. There are a few categories that really stand out, such as “consumer and customer engagement” - particularly around traditional ad experiences and shopping.

Now, I’m not saying navigating the web is this super pleasant experience right now that has no room for improvement. And god knows, we could do better than banner ads or video that hijack most of our ‘surfing’ experiences. But I’m also not sure that turning the web into the land of the chatbots is the answer either. Here’s the thing - there is lots of research out there showing how much people hate chatbots. Becasue they generally suck. And guess what - ChatGPT kinda sucks. It’s random, it’s gets things dead wrong, and it’s wildly inconsistent. Why trust it for anything that really matters right now?

I’m also not certain that everything that people use the internet for lends itself to single ‘answers.’ Would you be ok if when you search on Amazon, the site showed you one shirt, or a single coffee maker? What about when you are researching a former president, or a city you’d like to visit? You’re cool with a single source? Or an answer with no evident source?

Think about the trend among Gen Z and others to use TikTok and Instagram to search for vacation spots or favorite restaurants. Generationally, we trust influencers - real humans - over machine learning for things we really care about.

So again, focus group of one, but I’m still waiting around to start ChatGPTing anything and everything. And I don’t want to chat with the Web.

Then again, I’m the guy who wrote this.