A national survey from the University of Iowa about how people are using artificial intelligence brought some unexpected results, finding 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.
Chat GPT was the best-known generative A-I 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.
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.
Study co-author and U-I education professor Brian An says retired parents have started using A-I 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 A-I for personal activities than work, while more people feel gen A-I helped them personally than professionally.
