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Comment by bjt | Hacker News Reader

Good piece, but I think there's a missing angle to it. He cites a study showing how often people say they "use AI", and a little over 50% use it less than once per week.

If we're just talking about AI chat interfaces, sure. But I think the way that AI usage is going to grow isn't mostly by getting more chat engagement. It's about baking AI features into software that people already use.

For example, suppose you asked the same people "How often do you search on Google?" I am willing to bet the numbers go up a lot. And all of those people are "using AI" in a very real sense, they just don't think about it when it's baked in.

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I'd say this argument is not relevant to the specific question the article tries to answer, as AI adoption through these means is forced and may in many cases go against user preferences.

Edit: The deciding factor being whether you want to figure out if people are interested in AI / find it useful, or if the question you seek answered is more akin to "X% of people consume lead in their food"

People eating lead in their food don't know it's there.

People engaging with the AI built into Google results pages can see it, and assumedly Google's A/B testing showed that they engaged with it.

Bait and switch user interfaces to insert AI into places AI did not previously exist and make sure you see an AI answer before anything else is not far divorced from the "lead in food" example - especially when paired with efforts to make the 10 Blue Links become irrelevant garbage on average by ignoring most of the words you type in.

Maybe it's a better analogy to compare this to food-without-lead costing 10 times as much as food-with-lead in large part because of direct actions undertaken by lead manufacturers.

Google also serves ads, most people have gotten pretty good at ignoring them while the ads simultaneously being used enough to be profitable. Similarly, A/B testing only shows whether the net result is positive (by some measure to Google's interest) - not that most people engaged (or engaged positively) with it.

People are not terribly well informed on the specifics. Every time Spotify queues up a song, it has been selected by AI. That's been happening for a while without people getting upset about the effect on the employment of disc jockeys.

I am guessing the threshold is when changes outgrow mere consumer convenience and start being something imposed without choice.

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