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UI survey finds more people use AI for fun, not work
A national survey from the University of Iowa about how people are using artificial intelligence brought some unexpected results, finding that far more Americans are using the tech tool for personal entertainment than for work.
Ken Brown, a professor of management and entrepreneurship at the UI Tippie College of Business, says they focused on generative AI, which can be used to create text, images, and video.
“There were some folks who really just are not paying attention, or they know about AI, but they’re not using it,” Brown says. “Among the folks who were using it, at least lightly, 73% were using it for personal activities, and only 43% for work activities, and we were very surprised.”
ChatGPT was the best-known generative AI program among respondents, followed by CoPilot and Gemini. Brown says he was also taken aback when the survey revealed a whopping 95-percent of Americans are now familiar with at least one generative AI tool. And there was more he didn’t predict.
“Among people who were actively using, we had a lot of retirees,” Brown says. “In fact, there were more retirees than students who reported being sort of moderate-to-heavy users of generative AI.”
In a Radio Iowa interview, Brown was asked if the researchers had reached a bottom line with the survey as to whether AI is improving our lives, making us lazier, or just entertaining us.
“We really want to know, is generative AI making our lives better or is it making it worse, and we know it’s probably a little bit of both,” Brown says. “The question that we want to tackle next is, how is it making our lives better or worse, and what advice can we provide to people about how to use it so it’s making their lives better?”
Study co-author and UI education professor Brian An says retired parents have started using AI as a search engine for such tasks as finding recipes or learning about things they see in the news.
Researchers surveyed 1,000 nationally-selected people in December and found that even among full-time employees, more people reported they used AI for personal activities than work, while more people feel gen AI helped them personally than professionally.
