Is a decline in users for ChatGPT an indication that AI was never an enduring trend?
The Washington Post reported that traffic to ChatGPT’s website and app fell 9.7% in June from the previous month. It’s an indication that artificial intelligence (AI), introduced to a wide consumer audience with the launch of ChatGPT only six months before, has been a fad and now it’s peaked and declining.
It’s a neat theory and it fits the facts. But it’s nonsense.
Artificial intelligence is huge and ChatGPT is only a tiny part of it. When AI is more fully implemented many years from now, the last six months of experience with ChatGPT will be long forgotten.
I can’t say for sure why ChatGPT created such a sensation when it launched. AI of all types has been in development for a decade or more and it was clearly on its way long before ChatGPT arrived last November 30th.
ChatGPT made people notice once it became possible to create content, real and fake, as easily as it did. It was clear that this could change or replace a lot of job functions and that is both scary and exciting to a lot of people and moved AI from the theoretical to the real. The evolution from idea phase to in-your-face got a lot of attention.
But ChatGPT was never perfect. It gave wrong answers and it censored certain subjects, among many other issues. With the school year ending, the development of other uncensored competing tools and the novelty wearing off, it’s not surprising that ChatGPT is losing users.
More important, the ability to create content using artificial intelligence is only one small part of the impact that artificial intelligence will have. In theory, artificial intelligence can be applied anywhere that intelligence of any kind is now used. That’s what makes it such a huge, enduring concept.
It’s going to take time for AI to be developed. While we are used to seeing computers do things that are hard or impossible for humans, computers are fundamentally stupid. They need much more information to learn things than people do and that’s one of the major reasons why the implementation of AI will take a long time.
What It Means For Retailers And Brands
If you’re a brand or retailer who is contemplating, building or using AI in your business, here’s what the decline of ChatGPT users means for you: nothing.
The potential to improve your efficiency and delivery of products and services to consumers is going to be radically enhanced through the development of AI. There will come a time when AI will make recommendations to consumers for what they like that’s on sale at the supermarket, their favorite fashion store and everywhere else. Retailers will be able to figure out what products they need in which location that can be sold at a specific price. It’s behind the scenes so consumers won’t see it but it’s already starting to be implemented.
Like all technology, artificial intelligence can be helpful or harmful. But the decline in the use of ChatGPT is not an indication of anything about the future of artificial intelligence. New technology takes time to get created and the most important task in that right now is to stay the course. Neither the explosion in ChatGPT usage nor its decline means anything to anyone building a consumer-related business for the future.
