About a third of American adults say they’ve used the generative AI tool ChatGPT, while one in five say they’ve never heard of it, according to new survey results from the Pew Research Center.
The 34% who say they’ve used the gen AI tool from OpenAI include 58% of adults under 30, the largest share among any age cohort. The share of ChatGPT users drops with age: 41% of those 30 to 49, 25% of those 50 to 64 and 10% of those 65 and older. There’s also a correlation with education; among adults with bachelor’s or post-graduate degrees, about half reported using the tool. Only 33% of those with some college and 18% of those with a high school diploma or less said the same. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
The use of ChatGPT and other gen AI tools has grown dramatically just in the past couple of years. ChatGPT surged to popularity at the end of 2022 and has become a household name in the few years since. The Pew survey bears that out: The share of American adults saying they used ChatGPT has almost doubled since July 2023. But ChatGPT isn’t the only tool of its kind. Other tech companies have produced their own large language models, including Google’s Gemini and Meta’s Llama.
The Pew survey, from a panel of 5,123 adults surveyed from Feb. 24 to March 2, shows how people have come to use these tools, which can perform various tasks from writing documents to providing answers similar to search results (albeit maybe not quite as accurate). 28% of employed adults reported using it for tasks at work, 26% said they’d used it to learn something new and 22% said they’d used it for entertainment.
Other recent Pew results found many American workers had doubts about using AI in their jobs, and many were worried about the effect it would have. Other research has found that even as AI has become increasingly common in the workplace, it’s not without social costs, as colleagues and managers may judge those who admit to using AI.
Of course, not everyone is using these tools. The Pew results show that 20% of adults have heard nothing about ChatGPT. That figure is highest among those over the age of 65 (33%) or with a high school diploma or less (34%).