Everyone says that AI bots will improve our productivity, and the main players in AI development have already invested billions in creating and training LLMs. You’re probably hearing daily about artificial intelligence advancements and discoveries. However, according to recent Business of Apps statistics data, ChatGPT, the most popular AI bot, has only 250 million active users weekly.
In fact, only about 300 million people use AI bots regularly, and that refers to weekly, not daily usage. That is a very low number in a market with hundreds of billions of connected devices. Simply put, AI is not as popular as you might believe, and it will take some time before all of us use it regularly. Here are the reasons why people are not using AI.
10 ways you can use AI to improve your productivity
From help managing your schedule, to writing emails, AI can make you a lot more productive
5 No one understands yet what AI is and what it is for
I prefer chatting with a living person
Many friends ask me what the thing is with AI and what it does. That’s because they trust me with a simple explanation instead of the complex explanations they find online. But that’s also because they don’t really envision a useful way to use an AI bot.
When I asked ChatGPT to tell me what is AI in the most straightforward way, I got the following vague response:
AI, or Artificial Intelligence, is when computers and machines are made to think and learn like humans. Instead of just following simple instructions, AI can understand, decide, and improve over time.
Well, imagine that you’re talking to such a machine that draws the answers from the World Wide Web or from a learning model it was trained with.
However, you can use AI for many purposes, not only to get information about certain subjects. Nowadays, AI bots are specially created to create images and videos, summarize information, automatize software activities or processes, or just perform computational tasks.
In fact, you’ve been using AI for a long time if you have played even the most simple game on your PC. All the NPCs (non-player characters) use some sort of artificial intelligence algorithm to make the decisions in the game.
4 AI bots still offer false or incorrect information
The AI bot doesn’t verify the information
Unfortunately, AI misinformation is still a common problem for most AI LLMs and bots. When you’re asking for information, the AI bot will get the answer by searching online, exactly the same as you would do. The only advantage is that it does it a lot faster, and it credits the most popular results, which, of course, doesn’t mean that the information is correct or accurate.
Moreover, it can combine information from different sources, even if sometimes contradictory. Of course, AI bots are excellent at providing answers to simple questions, but if you ask it more complex questions or tasks, the AI bot still provides some ambiguous answers or solutions. Often, it inserts some questionable facts.
When it comes to creating images, the situation is even worse. For instance, the AI bots don’t know how to count. Try giving it instructions to draw a limited number of elements in a picture, and you will see what I mean. I asked ChatGPT three times to create an image containing 10 cucumbers; the result was never the same or correct.
In the same way, the AI bot doesn’t know how to write in a generated image, even if you’re specifying the exact text you need to include. That is because the AI knows how a cucumber looks, but it doesn’t have the concept of 10 cucumbers put together, and although you provide the text, it doesn’t know how the text looks in a picture. It simply doesn’t have the world representation as we perceive it. You can ask it to create a video with a person biting an apple, but after the character bites it, the apple won’t miss any piece.
3 Not many people know how to use AI bots
The query must include as much information as possible
It can be very easy to use a chatbot because it comprehends the natural language keywords and the connection between words. However, that doesn’t mean it can read your thoughts. For instance, if you ask it to write a short letter about a certain subject, you must provide all the possible information you want to include in the query. In this case, a good query would look something like this: write a five paragraph letter to X, who is a man, using academic language and include these topics (mention all the topics you want to include).
Imagine that the AI bot doesn’t know anything about the possible content, writing style, format, and so on. If you’re disappointed because the AI doesn’t fulfill your request properly, just try feeding it more information. However, many users don’t have the patience and drop it after a few bad tries.
It goes the same for text-to-image creation or any other AI application you stumble upon. If you try creating an image of 10 cucumbers and the AI keeps putting out a ridiculous number every time, that can be discouraging, right?
2 Good AI bots are not really that useful for regular users
They can’t even set a reminder for you right now
AI chatbots have evolved a lot in the last two years. If we compare the first ChatGPT version with GPT-4o, the differences are tremendous. You can have a verbal conversation with it on your phone, and it also has a natural voice with inflections in its tone. It answers quicker, and it’s a lot more accurate.
The purpose of AI chatbots is to become your daily assistants. They should evolve from just answering random questions to actual valuable tools. Making appointments, setting alerts, and engaging with the rest of the software should become normal, but they are still a bit far off from this type of usage.
I spent a full day chatting with GPT-4o on my Android phone, and, at first, I was amazed. It was talking to a person. However, when I tried to set up a simple task of setting a reminder, that didn’t work at all. The bot didn’t even know what my time zone was, even though I clearly told it about my location. Even when we got that straight, the bot failed to notify me at the scheduled time.
That is only a simple example, but the AI can’t do much for you except answer questions and create questionable pieces of text. And if you’re looking for more, you have to prepare for a premium price, which brings us to the next and final reason why people don’t use AI.
Supercharge your productivity with these top 5 AI note-taking apps
Use automatic transcription, content summarization, and other AI tools to revolutionize how you capture and organize information
1 Good AI bots are expensive
Prepare $20 per month for most premium AI bots
Most of the free AI chatbots are just fun toys right now. You can create funny images, play with text, get some useful information, and that’s about it. If you want the more advanced options, you have to pull out your credit card. The premium version of ChatGPT, GPT Plus, will set you back $20 a month per user. That is also the price of Microsoft Copilot Pro.
Of course, they are faster, have unlimited queries, and you get to test the latest advancements first. With Copilot for Microsoft 365, you also get integration with all the office apps for enhanced productivity and much more.
With GPT Plus, you get access to Sora AI to create small videos, and you can even create customized AI bots to use in different applications.
Even if $20 a month doesn’t sound like much, even the more advanced AI won’t make much difference if you’re not using it for office productivity. Let’s face it, they don’t have enough bang for the buck, and that’s all that counts for most of us.
It will catch on eventually
AI is extremely useful right now in automatization and computational tasks. And, as I mentioned above, you are using it even though you might not know. That is because it’s embedded in many applications, from Google or Siri assistants to graphics and design apps, gaming, CAD, and others.
With the advent of AI PCs, we will learn to use AI more and more, even if our interaction with the agents will probably be different. The reasons I mentioned here are just caveats along the way of our evolution.