According to estimates, there are 1.4 billion people that use a chatbot everyday across various platforms in 2024. In September, 2022 no one was using ChatGPT. It didn’t exist.
Why it matters
But the big question is. What are we using ChatGPT for? Is it just for entertainment or is it enhancing our productivity and creativity? As AI becomes more embedded in our daily activities, understanding its applications can help individuals and businesses leverage this technology to increase efficiency and innovation.
Diving into what others are using ChatGPT for reveals patterns that can help us be more creative and productive. It is also being used for entertainment and exploring human fantasies. But more about that later.
Between the lines
Various fund managers and venture capitalists are now telling us that AI is a waste of money. Because the “Magnificent 7” (that includes Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Meta and more) have spent $600 billion and counting with very little short term return on investment. That is like saying in 1995 that the web browser and the Internet are a distraction and a waste of time and money. It also reeks of short term thinking and impatience.
Charlie Munger (the right hand man of Warren Buffet at Berkshire Hathaway) was quoted as saying “The patient make money from the impatient.” AI and the dominant chatbot ChatGPT have only started. This is a generational change of technology. In fact it may be the biggest change that humanity has ever seen. Patience and playing the long game is required.
The big picture
The rapid advancement of AI technologies like the chatbot ChatGPT is reshaping industries including the creative industries. This includes creating blog posts, articles and images and even video. The creatives of Hollywood are becoming twitchy. They are asking questions such as “Will AI steal my job?” The right question to ask is “Will human beings using AI steal my job?”
According to an MIT Technology review article based on research by Shayne Longpre, Mahari and others at arxiv.org that analyzed one million ChatGPT logs, there are many ways that we are using ChatGPT. The chart below reveals the top 11 ways we are using chatbots.
The fact that creative composition sits at #1 is not surprising but the use of Chatbots for sexual content being ranked at #2 was a revelation. ChatGPT and other general primary chatbots are very much controlled and censored. But open source AI allows anyone to create custom chatbots for specific uses.
ChatGPT is not the only chat bot game in town and people are creating chatbots that target niches. Entrepreneurs are always on the lookout for what people want and desire and then create new products and services that make them money.
Going deeper
AI allows us to use a digital assistant (chatbots) to do the heavy lifting. Find information, organizing it, unearthing insights and much more. As humans we are always looking to find easier and faster ways to do things. Laziness meets efficiency. Doing more with less.
So in looking at the many ways we are using AI, keep in mind that ChatGPT allows us to be more productive, creative, even distracted and entertained. That’s why I found it fascinating to see where the attention and use of chatbots is emerging.
The 11 top ways we are using ChatGPT
Let’s take a deeper dive into what the 11 top ways people are using Chatbots including ChatGPT.
Here are the top 11 uses of chatGPT in order of usage and with ChatGPT used for helping us be more creative as the most popular way we as humans interact with the AI machine is maybe not expected.
- Creative composition – This includes text, images and video. Give ChatGPT a series of prompts for creating a new article or for an image and it will surprise you. And sometimes delight you. This sits at 30% as the top use of chatBots and ChatGPT.
- Sexual Content – The “Not Safe for Work” (NSFW is the acronym) is a new term for AI systems designed to facilitate adult themed interactions and help people explore their fantasies.
Here is an interesting list of “The Best 42 Free NSFW AI chatbots in 2024”. The sex bot seems to have made its impact and sexual role playing using Chatbots seems to have delighted many lonely and unfulfilled people and it seems it is a bit addictive.
But maybe this is because the porn sites have adopted new technology faster than most industries which is not generally discussed but is a reality. This surprising use of Chatbots is currently 13% of chatbot use. - Brainstorming and planning – Nothing like asking ChatGPT to provide ideas that expand our fixed and frozen imaginations. I often use it for helping me come up with new ideas or expanding my thinking. It is like having an idea generator at your beck and call.
- Explanation and reasoning – Sometimes you find a phrase that is confusing. The words are obscure and the reasoning is cloudy. Often academics who wrote a scientific paper forgot to use plain language and used acronyms we have never seen or heard. ChatGPT can distill that in simple language. In seconds ChatGPT can make sense of the phrase.
- General information – Asking the oracle (AI) for some general information that bypasses the tangled response of a search engine is time saving.Using Google search is great and has evolved way beyond its basic foundations.
But it only provides simple insights that include things like snippets that link to websites that answer questions that are commonly asked on its search engine answer page “People also ask.” ChatGPT prompts can take your question or prompt and curate and distill all that information in an easy to understand response. - Coding composition – I have never been able to write code. It appears that ChatGPT can now make many of us coders.
- Academic composition – Academia is a convoluted and complex ecosystem which has been built over centuries. The rules are many and the process is often confusing when it comes to writing a scientific paper. Asking AI to make sense of this complexity and the “big words” to help you sound intelligent could maybe get you a better grade when writing for the professor.
- Translation – Speaking another language or translating it in the past needed skilled translators. Slow and expensive. ChatGPT turns this into one prompt. “Translate this text into French”. The biblical story of the Tower of Babel and its confusion for communicating globally has been fixed by AI. The “gods” will not be happy.
- Organization info – Using AI to create processes for your business is often done with a few prompts after feeding it some information in a text format. There are many other ways ChatGPT can be used for creating, summarizing, organizing any business information.
- E-commerce – Chatbots are increasingly being used in eCommerce to enhance customer experience, assist customer service, streamline operations, and personalized shopping assistance. It ranks at #10 with a 2% usage rate as a share of the top 11 chatbot uses..
- News – ChatGPT and large language models are usually lagging in up to date news but it seems that a few people are expecting that it is faster than social media. I was interviewed 10 years ago and surprised to learn that most young people got their news from social media rather than directly from the source. It seems that this trend continues with AI and ChatGPT.
The major insight for me is that AI is not only helping us do the heavy lifting on removing the mundane but it is also becoming our creative assistant.
A wrap
The use of new technologies continues to surprise me and any complex technology that is given a simple and easy to use user interface has changed the world and our lives.
It started with making the PC easy to use with Microsoft Windows, It then showed its friendly face on how to use the Internet with the Web Browser (Netscape, Internet Explorer and its successors), The Google search engine, The smartphone (Apple’s easy to use touch screen) and its app store.
And now we have the complexity of AI being given a simple prompt box user interface to discover humanities intelligence and curate it with one click.
As we have used these new technologies, the creative human spirit and ingenuity continues to surprise us. What is the future of AI and its sibling chatbots – including the current leading app – ChatGPT that is not even 2 years old?
The wild west of AI and chatbots will continue. Many offspring and multiple twists and turns will show up. I watch with curiosity and optimism.