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So the actual breaking news here is "Brits actually fairly normal after all"? Neither X nor AI is particularly relevant to the average person, British or not,

So the actual breaking news here is "Brits actually fairly normal after all"? Neither X nor AI is particularly relevant to the average person, British or not, unless they're terminally online and/or the kind of person to write unhinged nonsense on LinkedIn. Sure quite a few people might use ChatGPT or whatever sometimes, but they use Excel too and they're probably not especially "interested" in that either.

ben_w 2y ago
The average person on AI: "Forty-three percent had used one for work" … "The numbers are slightly different for the under-16s. Fifty-four percent said they had used a GenAI tool, with more than half (53 percent) of those saying they had used it for schoolwork."
- jrflowers 2y ago
  This makes sense. Since googling something now counts as “using a genai tool” everybody uses and cares about AI
- defnotai 2y ago
  Some people are being pressured by their management to use AI to increase efficiency in their jobs, with varying degrees of success. I have a friend who works in logistics for GE and they’re getting training on the basics of GenAI and then they have to go out and find ways to integrate it into their workflow. The problem is that management isn’t doing the legwork to understand how to integrate the tooling, they’re just handing that responsibility off to the actual users. Those people wind up complaining that taking time to integrate these tools winds up slowing them down and they struggle to find meaningful applications for the LLMs. It’s like management is saying “here’s a new hammer, we don’t know how to use it but the guy who sold it to us convinced us you can figure out how to use it. So go out and do it and be better and faster at your job, good luck”.
  - silisili 2y ago
    I'm running into this now. Boss is all but mandating everyone use Cursor. I'm not anti-AI. I don't mind asking an LLM to write me some boilerplate. But I don't want to change my tooling, nor have an integrated assistant. My output is fine. I'll hold out as long as I can, but it feels like this may one day just become the reality.
    - defnotai 2y ago
      Hype cycles come and go, AI will be no different. The core technology may remain and advance, but the fever will break once reality sets in/and or prices continue to climb.
  - scrps 2y ago
    Gonna be fun to see the results of cases like "I didn't defraud the company, gen AI did!" Of which I suspect some will actually be fraud and some not but I don't envy the lawyer who has to explain neuronal computation to a nontechnical person.
- jdietrich 2y ago
  78% of people aged 16-24 had used a GenAI tool in the last year. That's a remarkable adoption rate IMO. We're talking about this technology as if it's the future, but it has already transformed secondary and post-secondary education beyond all recognition. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/research-and-data/online-research/online-nation/2024/online-nation-2024-report.pdf?v=386238 https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/rese...
  - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
    > 78% of people aged 16-24 had used a GenAI tool in the last year. That's a remarkable adoption rate IMO. We're talking about this technology as if it's the future, but it has already transformed secondary and post-secondary education beyond all recognition. Your wording choice there is excellent as "transforming" can either be extremely positive, or negative, or just different. Given how many students now, judging by various outcries on social media by teaching staff are borderline illiterate in middle school, it does make one wonder what the long term effects of this will be.
    - jncfhnb 2y ago
      Standardized test scores were marginally improving for decades, although they tanked during Covid
    - Gigachad 2y ago
      It looks like the transformation is going to be that all marked work will be done on paper in class. Anything else is pointless since students just have all their work generated for them.
  - tmnvix 2y ago
    > 78% of people aged 16-24 had used a GenAI tool in the last year. More interesting would be the percentage of people that have used GenAI in the past year with a purpose. I suspect a significant number have just played with it. Likely many didn't make it a habit, let alone ever do anything useful with it. It would be a bit of a stretch to say anyone in this group has 'adopted' AI.
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  > Forty-three percent had used one for work That's honestly pretty low considering the sheer number of products that now have AI integration. I honestly think a lot of the hype around AI taking over jobs is because the people who are spreading it are more likely working in some pretty dull coding environments where copilot can shine, because you just plain don't write a ton of interesting or otherwise off-the-beaten-path code, and that's what copilot excels at. And then those people have spare time at work to evangelize about this great technology. And before anybody starts with me, yes I have tried it. It's fine. A lot of what I work on isn't standardized or boilerplate enough to where copilot can really help me, and the situations where it can, I found the time I spent describing what I wanted, getting the answer back, copying it into my IDE and then customizing it as required was frankly just better spent writing it myself. Maybe it made me SLIGHTLY faster? But nothing approaching what I would suggest the term "coding AI" implies, and frankly, I enjoy writing the easier code on occasion because it's a nice break from the harder stuff that copilot can't touch. Like if you're a freelancer who jumps between gigs of refactoring ancient websites into something vaguely web 2.0, you would probably get a lot of mileage from copilot where you're just describing something as written (or hell, giving it the existing code) and asking for it to be rewritten. But if you're doing something novel, something that hasn't been posted on StackOverflow a thousand times, you will run into it's limitations quite quickly and, if you're like me anyway, resign it to the bin because fundamentally asking it to make something, finding out it can't, and then making it myself is FAR more annoying than just assuming it can't and moving on.
- 1oooqooq 2y ago
  everyone who had to fill in pages of text for no particular reason they believe in, will use any means no matter how bad. this included teens doing homework, and everyone else filling job applications. same mindset. ai? sure. google search and adapting any template on the very first page? sure!
- weego 2y ago
  Getting Claude to extract numbers from the image of a spreadsheet someone inexplicably sent you instead of the actual spreadsheet is not the same as "being interested in AI"
  - KTibow 2y ago
    From my experience most people who use anything other than ChatGPT/c.ai are somewhat interested in AI
    - detourdog 2y ago
      I’m interested in ai but still haven’t used it. When I finally focus on it I will try kagi’s ai. I already subscribe to search.
      - ben_w 2y ago
        > I’m interested in ai but still haven’t used it There's several free options, so what's stopping you?
        detourdog 2y ago
        Hard to say. Here are a few things keeping Me from looking into it. I might feel so entrenched in my process that I can’t figure out where to start. The current crop of offerings only interest me from a self hosted point of view. I’m interested in an ai that is aligned with closely to my own world view. If there is a bias built in I would rather be generated by me. When this ai wave first started the story was it was so complex the origin of the answers was considered in unauditable. Which I took as deceptive or the pushers didn’t understand what they were doing. When I stated my interest it goes back to the ‘80s and I was playing with OpenCYC about 15 years ago. I keep saying I will take a look but other projects keep grabbing my interest.
        ben_w 2y ago
        I understand where you're coming from. Good news on a few of those points, but not all of them. > I might feel so entrenched in my process that I can’t figure out where to start. This is the easy one. You can just tell them that, in those words, with what you're up to, and they suggest stuff back in English. (And if you're not a native English speaker, use your native language and many will respond in that language instead of in English). > The current crop of offerings only interest me from a self hosted point of view. My experience with current self-hosted ones is… they're not worth bothering with. (But also, my machine is limited in the model size it can use locally, so this may not impact you so much). > I’m interested in an ai that is aligned with closely to my own world view. If there is a bias built in I would rather be generated by me. Good news here, but for what I consider to be bad reasons. They're often wildly sycophantic, so they'll often display whatever bias they "think" you have. > When this ai wave first started the story was it was so complex the origin of the answers was considered in unauditable. Which I took as deceptive or the pushers didn’t understand what they were doing. It's getting slightly better, but unfortunately the problem is mostly the "don't understand", there's too many different teams for me to feel it's deceptive. If you really need auditable results, I'd stay away from them too — they're definitely not in the vein of AI that CYC ever was.
bdangubic 2y ago
this might also be a demographic issue - I live in an afluent area and genai is woven already into everyday so much that it is already difficult to imagine life without it. just couple of example - my 11-year old kid does most if not all of her studying/research/… through genai. her class has a google doc where they share prompts they found useful for learning xyz… my kid asked me something last week and I said “no clue, google it” and her response was “google it??? thats funny dad…” my homeowners association used genai to go through years of transaction to create a budget etc…
- rsynnott 2y ago
  > my homeowners association used genai to go through years of transaction to create a budget etc… … Yikes. Hope they checked it afterwards. These things are quite bad at financial stuff; they’re good at producing something which looks superficially reasonable, but when you look closer, well, it’s all nonsense.
  - bdangubic 2y ago
    I know, right?!
tzs 2y ago
> Neither X nor AI is particularly relevant to the average person, British or not, unless they're terminally online and/or the kind of person to write unhinged nonsense on LinkedIn. According to the article X reached 26 million UK adults in May 2022. That's half of the UK adult population.
- verzali 2y ago
  Down to 22.1 million now though, I think is the point. But honestly, twitter never forms much of the conversation outside of media types.
  - valval 2y ago
    People would of course talk about the information found on the platform, not the platform itself.
- KeplerBoy 2y ago
  That's a pretty meaningless figure without the methodology used to come up with it. It might just mean 26 million uk adults have heard of a tweet. Think covfefe, barely anyone read that tweet and yet it reached everyone.

ben_w 2y ago

The average person on AI: "Forty-three percent had used one for work" … "The numbers are slightly different for the under-16s. Fifty-four percent said they had used a GenAI tool, with more than half (53 percent) of those saying they had used it for schoolwork."

jrflowers 2y ago
This makes sense. Since googling something now counts as “using a genai tool” everybody uses and cares about AI
defnotai 2y ago
Some people are being pressured by their management to use AI to increase efficiency in their jobs, with varying degrees of success. I have a friend who works in logistics for GE and they’re getting training on the basics of GenAI and then they have to go out and find ways to integrate it into their workflow. The problem is that management isn’t doing the legwork to understand how to integrate the tooling, they’re just handing that responsibility off to the actual users. Those people wind up complaining that taking time to integrate these tools winds up slowing them down and they struggle to find meaningful applications for the LLMs. It’s like management is saying “here’s a new hammer, we don’t know how to use it but the guy who sold it to us convinced us you can figure out how to use it. So go out and do it and be better and faster at your job, good luck”.
- silisili 2y ago
  I'm running into this now. Boss is all but mandating everyone use Cursor. I'm not anti-AI. I don't mind asking an LLM to write me some boilerplate. But I don't want to change my tooling, nor have an integrated assistant. My output is fine. I'll hold out as long as I can, but it feels like this may one day just become the reality.
  - defnotai 2y ago
    Hype cycles come and go, AI will be no different. The core technology may remain and advance, but the fever will break once reality sets in/and or prices continue to climb.
- scrps 2y ago
  Gonna be fun to see the results of cases like "I didn't defraud the company, gen AI did!" Of which I suspect some will actually be fraud and some not but I don't envy the lawyer who has to explain neuronal computation to a nontechnical person.
jdietrich 2y ago
78% of people aged 16-24 had used a GenAI tool in the last year. That's a remarkable adoption rate IMO. We're talking about this technology as if it's the future, but it has already transformed secondary and post-secondary education beyond all recognition. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/research-and-data/online-research/online-nation/2024/online-nation-2024-report.pdf?v=386238 https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/rese...
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  > 78% of people aged 16-24 had used a GenAI tool in the last year. That's a remarkable adoption rate IMO. We're talking about this technology as if it's the future, but it has already transformed secondary and post-secondary education beyond all recognition. Your wording choice there is excellent as "transforming" can either be extremely positive, or negative, or just different. Given how many students now, judging by various outcries on social media by teaching staff are borderline illiterate in middle school, it does make one wonder what the long term effects of this will be.
  - jncfhnb 2y ago
    Standardized test scores were marginally improving for decades, although they tanked during Covid
  - Gigachad 2y ago
    It looks like the transformation is going to be that all marked work will be done on paper in class. Anything else is pointless since students just have all their work generated for them.
- tmnvix 2y ago
  > 78% of people aged 16-24 had used a GenAI tool in the last year. More interesting would be the percentage of people that have used GenAI in the past year with a purpose. I suspect a significant number have just played with it. Likely many didn't make it a habit, let alone ever do anything useful with it. It would be a bit of a stretch to say anyone in this group has 'adopted' AI.
ToucanLoucan 2y ago
> Forty-three percent had used one for work That's honestly pretty low considering the sheer number of products that now have AI integration. I honestly think a lot of the hype around AI taking over jobs is because the people who are spreading it are more likely working in some pretty dull coding environments where copilot can shine, because you just plain don't write a ton of interesting or otherwise off-the-beaten-path code, and that's what copilot excels at. And then those people have spare time at work to evangelize about this great technology. And before anybody starts with me, yes I have tried it. It's fine. A lot of what I work on isn't standardized or boilerplate enough to where copilot can really help me, and the situations where it can, I found the time I spent describing what I wanted, getting the answer back, copying it into my IDE and then customizing it as required was frankly just better spent writing it myself. Maybe it made me SLIGHTLY faster? But nothing approaching what I would suggest the term "coding AI" implies, and frankly, I enjoy writing the easier code on occasion because it's a nice break from the harder stuff that copilot can't touch. Like if you're a freelancer who jumps between gigs of refactoring ancient websites into something vaguely web 2.0, you would probably get a lot of mileage from copilot where you're just describing something as written (or hell, giving it the existing code) and asking for it to be rewritten. But if you're doing something novel, something that hasn't been posted on StackOverflow a thousand times, you will run into it's limitations quite quickly and, if you're like me anyway, resign it to the bin because fundamentally asking it to make something, finding out it can't, and then making it myself is FAR more annoying than just assuming it can't and moving on.
1oooqooq 2y ago
everyone who had to fill in pages of text for no particular reason they believe in, will use any means no matter how bad. this included teens doing homework, and everyone else filling job applications. same mindset. ai? sure. google search and adapting any template on the very first page? sure!
weego 2y ago
Getting Claude to extract numbers from the image of a spreadsheet someone inexplicably sent you instead of the actual spreadsheet is not the same as "being interested in AI"
- KTibow 2y ago
  From my experience most people who use anything other than ChatGPT/c.ai are somewhat interested in AI
  - detourdog 2y ago
    I’m interested in ai but still haven’t used it. When I finally focus on it I will try kagi’s ai. I already subscribe to search.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      > I’m interested in ai but still haven’t used it There's several free options, so what's stopping you?
      - detourdog 2y ago
        Hard to say. Here are a few things keeping Me from looking into it. I might feel so entrenched in my process that I can’t figure out where to start. The current crop of offerings only interest me from a self hosted point of view. I’m interested in an ai that is aligned with closely to my own world view. If there is a bias built in I would rather be generated by me. When this ai wave first started the story was it was so complex the origin of the answers was considered in unauditable. Which I took as deceptive or the pushers didn’t understand what they were doing. When I stated my interest it goes back to the ‘80s and I was playing with OpenCYC about 15 years ago. I keep saying I will take a look but other projects keep grabbing my interest.
        ben_w 2y ago
        I understand where you're coming from. Good news on a few of those points, but not all of them. > I might feel so entrenched in my process that I can’t figure out where to start. This is the easy one. You can just tell them that, in those words, with what you're up to, and they suggest stuff back in English. (And if you're not a native English speaker, use your native language and many will respond in that language instead of in English). > The current crop of offerings only interest me from a self hosted point of view. My experience with current self-hosted ones is… they're not worth bothering with. (But also, my machine is limited in the model size it can use locally, so this may not impact you so much). > I’m interested in an ai that is aligned with closely to my own world view. If there is a bias built in I would rather be generated by me. Good news here, but for what I consider to be bad reasons. They're often wildly sycophantic, so they'll often display whatever bias they "think" you have. > When this ai wave first started the story was it was so complex the origin of the answers was considered in unauditable. Which I took as deceptive or the pushers didn’t understand what they were doing. It's getting slightly better, but unfortunately the problem is mostly the "don't understand", there's too many different teams for me to feel it's deceptive. If you really need auditable results, I'd stay away from them too — they're definitely not in the vein of AI that CYC ever was.

bdangubic 2y ago

this might also be a demographic issue - I live in an afluent area and genai is woven already into everyday so much that it is already difficult to imagine life without it. just couple of example - my 11-year old kid does most if not all of her studying/research/… through genai. her class has a google doc where they share prompts they found useful for learning xyz… my kid asked me something last week and I said “no clue, google it” and her response was “google it??? thats funny dad…” my homeowners association used genai to go through years of transaction to create a budget etc…

rsynnott 2y ago
> my homeowners association used genai to go through years of transaction to create a budget etc… … Yikes. Hope they checked it afterwards. These things are quite bad at financial stuff; they’re good at producing something which looks superficially reasonable, but when you look closer, well, it’s all nonsense.
- bdangubic 2y ago
  I know, right?!

tzs 2y ago

> Neither X nor AI is particularly relevant to the average person, British or not, unless they're terminally online and/or the kind of person to write unhinged nonsense on LinkedIn. According to the article X reached 26 million UK adults in May 2022. That's half of the UK adult population.

verzali 2y ago
Down to 22.1 million now though, I think is the point. But honestly, twitter never forms much of the conversation outside of media types.
- valval 2y ago
  People would of course talk about the information found on the platform, not the platform itself.
KeplerBoy 2y ago
That's a pretty meaningless figure without the methodology used to come up with it. It might just mean 26 million uk adults have heard of a tweet. Think covfefe, barely anyone read that tweet and yet it reached everyone.