 |
|
|
|||||
Three years ago, if someone needed to fix a leaky faucet or understand inflation, they usually did one of three things: typed the question into Google, searched YouTube for a how-to video or shouted desperately at Alexa for help. Today, millions of people start with a different approach: They open ChatGPT and just ask. Im a professor and director of research impact and AI strategy at Mississippi State University Libraries. As a scholar who studies information retrieval, I see that this shift of the tool people reach for first for finding information is at the heart of how ChatGPT has changed everyday technology use. Change in searching The biggest change isnt that other tools have vanished. Its that ChatGPT has become the new front door to information. Within months of its introduction on Nov. 30, 2022, ChatGPT had 100 million weekly users. By late 2025, that figure had grown to 800 million. That makes it one of the most widely used consumer technologies on the planet. Surveys show that this use isnt just curiosityit reflects a real change in behavior. A 2025 Pew Research Center study found that 34% of U.S. adults have used ChatGPT, roughly double the share found in 2023. Among adults under 30, a clear majority (58%) have tried it. An AP-NORC poll reports that about 60% of U.S. adults who use AI say they use it to search for information, making this the most common AI use case. The number rises to 74% for the under-30 crowd. Traditional search engines are still the backbone of the online information ecosystem, but the kind of searching people do has shifted in measurable ways since ChatGPT entered the scene. People are changing which tool they reach for first. For years, Google was the default for everything from how to reset my router to explain the debt ceiling. These basic informational queries made up a huge portion of search traffic. But these quick, clarifying, everyday what does this mean questions are the ones ChatGPT now answers faster and more cleanly than a page of links. And people have noticed. A 2025 U.S. consumer survey found that 55% of respondents now use OpenAIs ChatGPT or Googles Gemini AI chatbots about tasks they previously would have asked Google search to help them with, with even higher usage figures for the U.K. Another analysis of more than 1 billion search sessions found that traffic from generative AI platforms is growing 165 times faster than traditional searches, and about 13 million U.S. adults have already made generative AI their go-to tool for online discovery. This doesnt mean people have stopped Googling, but it means ChatGPT has peeled off the kinds of questions for which users want a direct explanation instead of a list of links. Curious about a policy update? Need a definition? Want a polite way to respond to an uncomfortable email? ChatGPT is faster, feels more conversational and feels more definitive. At the same time, Google isnt standing still. Its search results look different than they did three years ago because Google started weaving its AI system Gemini directly into the top of the page. The AI Overview summaries that appear above traditional search links now instantly answer many simple questionssometimes accurately, sometimes less so. But either way, many people never scroll past that AI-generated snapshot. This fact combined with the impact of ChatGPT are the reasons the number of zero-click searches has surged. One report using Similarweb data found that traffic from Google to news sites fell from over 2.3 billion visits in mid-2024 to under 1.7 billion in May 2025, while the share of news-related searches ending in zero clicks jumped from 56% to 69% in one year. Google search excels at pointing to a wide range of sources and perspectives, but the results can feel cluttered and designed more for clicks than clarity. ChatGPT, by contrast, delivers a more focused and conversational response that prioritizes explanation over ranking. The ChatGPT response can lack the source transparency and multiple viewpoints often found in a Google search. In terms of accuracy, both tools can occasionally get it wrong. Googles strength lies in letting users cross-check multiple sources, while ChatGPTs accuracy depends heavily on the quality of the prompt and the users ability to recognize when a response should be verified elsewhere. OpenAI is aiming to make it even more appealing to turn to ChatPGT first for search by trying to get people to use a browser with ChatGPT built in. Smart speakers and YouTube The impact of ChatGPT has reverberated beyond search engines. Voice assistants, such as Alexa speakers and Google Home, continue to report high ownership, but that number is down slightly. One 2025 summary of voice-search statistics estimates that about 34% of people ages 12 and up own a smart speaker, down from 35% in 2023. This is not a dramatic decline, but the lack of growth may indicate a shift of more complex queries to ChatGPT or similar tools. When people want a detailed explanation, a step-by-step plan or help drafting something, a voice assistant that answers in a short sentence suddenly feels limited. By contrast, YouTube remains a giant. As of 2024, it had approximately 2.74 billion users, with that number increasing steadily since 2010. Among U.S. teens, about 90% say they use YouTube, making it the most widely used platform in that age group. But what kind of videos people are looking for is changing. People now tend to start with ChatGPT and then move to YouTube if they need the additional information a how-to video conveys. For many everyday tasks, such as explain my health benefits or help me write a complaint email, people ask ChatGPT for a summary, script or checklist. They head to YouTube only if they need to seea physical process. You can see a similar pattern in more specialized spaces. Software engineers, for instance, have long relied on sites such as Stack Overflow for tips and pieces of software code. But question volume there began dropping sharply after ChatGPTs release, and one analysis suggests overall traffic fell by about 50% between 2022 and 2024. When a chatbot can generate a code snippet and an explanation on demand, fewer people bother typing a question into a public forum. So where does that leave us? Three years in, ChatGPT hasnt replaced the rest of the tech stack; its reordered it. The default search has shifted. Search engines are still for deep dives and complex comparisons. YouTube is still for seeing real people do real things. Smart speakers are still for hands-free convenience. But when people need to figure something out, many now start with a chat conversation, not a search box. Thats the real ChatGPT effect: It didnt just add another app to our phonesit quietly changed how we look things up in the first place. Deborah Lee is a professor and director of research impact and AI strategy at Mississippi State University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Category:
E-Commerce
Theres an old myth that Inuit cultures have as many as a hundred words for snow. I remember learning about it in school, and there was just something wonderful about the idea that peoples perceptions can be so deeply rich and different. I guess thats why, although it has been debunked many times, the story keeps getting repeated. There is also a lot of truth to the underlying concept. As anybody who has ever learned another language or lived in a different culture knows, peoples perceptions vary widely. In The WEIRDest People In The World, Harvards Joseph Henrich documents how important and interesting these differences can be. So if the Inuit snow myth highlights an important concept, many would argue that theres no real harm in repeating it, in much the same way we continue to tell the apocryphal story of George Washington cutting down his fathers cherry tree. Yet truth matters. Once we start degrading it, we lose our ability to understand what is often a messy and nuanced world. What do you call a square? What makes the Inuit snow myth compelling is that it so viscerally illustrates how language can reveal deeper truths. For example, in German the word for square is Platz and in neighboring Poland, it is Plac, a word that is pronounced very similarly. In Russian, the word is Ploshchad, so again, you can see the family resemblance. In Ukraine, however, which is geographically and linguistically in the middle of all those countries, the word for square is completely different. It is Maidan and comes from Turkish, which gives you hints about Ukraines history with the Crimean Khanate, its historical ties to Byzantium, and lots of other interesting things. Slavic languages are filled with these fascinating historical remnants. The word slav comes from the same root as word (slov). So Slavs considered themselves people of the word. The word for German in slavic languages is Niemiec, which roughly translates to doesnt speak, and shows how the Slavs considered the Germanic tribes Barbarians. Languages, of course, continue to evolve. Since the early 1990s, the Independence Square in the center of Kyiv, the Maidan Nezalezhnosti, has been the place where people go to protest, especially during the Orange Revolution in 2004 and the Revolution of Dignity in 2014. So today, when Ukrainians say that its time to go to the Maidan, they mean its time to revolt. The Inuit snow myth alerts us to the possibility of examining languages in this way and many would argue that we shouldn’t let the truth get in the way of a good story. Still, once we abandon truth, we start down a troubled path. The myths of Blockbuster, Kodak, and Xerox PARC We tell stories because specific narratives can often point to more general principles. For example, when pundits want to show the dangers of complacent corporate giants getting caught sleeping, they often point to Blockbuster, Kodak, and Xerox. Yet, much like the Inuit snow myth, these stories arent really true. Lets look at each one in turn. Blockbuster is supposedly a cautionary tale because it ignored Netflix until it was too late. Yet as Gina Keating, who covered the story for years at Reuters, explains in her book Netflixed, the video giant moved relatively quickly and came up with a successful strategy. The real problem was that those changes tanked the stock price and the strategy was reversed when CEO John Antioco left after a compensation dispute with investor Carl Icahn. In a similar vein, were often told that, after inventing digital photography, Kodak ignored the market. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, its EasyShare line of cameras were top sellers. It also made big investments in quality printing for digital photos. The problem was that it made most of its money on developing film, a business that completely disappeared. Another popular fable is that Xerox failed to commercialize the technology developed at its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), when in fact the laser printer developed there saved the company. What also conveniently gets left out is that Steve Jobs was able to get access to the companys technology to build the Macintosh because Xerox had invested in Apple and then profited handsomely from that investment. I recently got the chance to discuss each of these with Paul Nunes, who for years headed up thought leadership at Accenture, on Aidan McCullins Innovation Show and what we noticed was that, in each case, the pundit version would lead you exactly the wrong way. Blockbusters problem wasnt that they ignored external threats, but failed to account for internal resistance. Digital photography would never have replaced Kodaks film developing business and Xerox PARC is actually a success story that other firms would do well to emulate. Feynmans Law History is full of brave souls who defied the status quo. In the 1840s, Ignaz Semmelweis pioneered handwashing in hospitals, only to be rebuked by the medical establishment. In the early 20th century, William Coley pioneered cancer immunotherapy, only to be ignored. Barry Marshall was pilloried for his work that showed peptic ulcers were caused not by stress, but by the bacterium H. pylori. Yet being contrarian doesnt make you right. During Soviet times, Trofim Lysenko’s pseudoscientific agricultural theories led to crop failures and contributed to famines that killed millions. More recently, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.s vaccine skepticism has coincided with a resurgence of measles. So how do we engage in healthy skepticism of the zeitgeist without descending into quackery? The physicist Richard Feynman, one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, offers helpful guidance. He said that science begins with a guess. Thats not only allowable, but necessary. To discover something new, you need to let your mind roam free. Impossible, even ridiculous ideas, are how we break new ground. Yet the second step is crucial: you have to test your ideas. Or, as Feynman put it, If it disagrees with experiment, its wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesnt make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesnt matter how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is If it disagrees with experiment, its wrong. Thats all there is to it. The Narrative Fallacy The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio believes we encode experiences in our bodies as somatic markers and that our emotions often alert us to things that our brains arent aware of. Another researcher, Joseph Ledoux, reached similar conclusions. He pointed out that our body reacts much faster than our mind, such as when we jump out of the way of an oncoming object and only seconds later realize what happened. Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman suggests that we have two modes of thinking. The first is emotive, intuitive, and fast. The second is rational, deliberative, and slow. Our bodies evolved to make decisions quickly in life-or-death situations. Our rational minds came much later and dont automatically engage. It takes conscious effort to activate the second system. The problem is that when something feels right, humans have a tendency to build stories around them. False fables like those about Blockbuster, Kodak, and Xerox, purport to teach us important lessons, but the truth is that they rob us of the opportunity to unlock deeper insights. Thats why Ive learned to be suspicious of good stories, especially those that I want to be true because they just feel right. We need to constantly interrogate our feelings, especially in areas for which we do not have specific training or relevant expertise. We need to understand what exactly our emotions are alerting us to, and that requires us to engage our rational mind. Thats why, sometimes, you need to let the truth get in the way of a good story.
Category:
E-Commerce
A growing number of Amazon employees have signed onto an open letter issuing some dire warnings about the companys sprint toward AI. The letter, signed by more than 1,000 workers and published this week, calls out Amazon for pushing its AI investments at the expense of the climate and its human workforce. The letters supporters come from a wide array of roles at the company, including many software engineers, and even employees focused on building AI systems. We believe that the all-costs-justified, warp-speed approach to AI development will do staggering damage to democracy, to our jobs, and to the earth, the letters authors wrote. Were the workers who develop, train, and use AI, so we have a responsibility to intervene. In the letter obtained by The Guardian, the Amazon employees argue that their employer is throwing out its climate promises in the scramble to win the AI race. Amazon has pledged to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040, pointing to efficiencies from electric delivery vehicles and reduced plastic packaging in its climate commitment. In spite of its stated promise to reduce its carbon footprint, Amazons carbon emissions rose last year, a trend tied to pollution from its ubiquitous fleet of delivery vehicles and its major push into data center construction.Resource intensive data centers like the ones Amazon is pouring billions into building out are a hot topic in 2025. The buildings, built to power tech giants AI ambitions, pump in loads of electricity to keep servers humming and suck up water to cool off all of that energy use. Data centers, usually placed well beyond urban hubs, promise rural communities a boom of steady local jobs for many of the worlds most valuable companies, but the reality is often less inspiring. In spite of their massive footprint and a short term burst of work during construction, very few people are actually necessary to keep things up and running. In light of the downsides, rural communities around the country are beginning to reject big techs big AI buildout. AI at all costs Climate isnt the only concern among the Amazon workers who signed onto the open letter. The group of anonymous employees accuses the company of forcing AI on its workforce while openly plotting to get rid of human workers as soon as technologically possible. In the meantime, the letters authors say that timelines are getting shorter and output demands are on the rise as the company tries to squeeze every last drop of productivity out of its employees. Last month, Amazon announced that it would lay off 14,000 employees, a massive round of cuts focused on its corporate workforce. In a memo to employees, Amazons Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology Beth Galetti said that the cuts were aimed at reducing bureaucracy, removing layers, and shifting resources to ensure were investing in our biggest bets namely the companys enormous spending on AI. The world is changing quickly, Galetti wrote. This generation of AI is the most transformative technology weve seen since the Internet, and its enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones). Amazons AI spending this year has topped $125 billion and the company plans to invest that much and more into artificial intelligence in 2026. A call for guardrails The letter also points to Amazons major lobbying push against AI regulation and its role in spreading surveillance and military technology as major areas of concern. To address the worries it raises, the letter calls on Amazon to abandon dirty energy in order to recommit to its climate goals, loop non-manager employee voices into AI decision making and reject surveillance and deportation applications of its technology. The letter only represents a tiny sliver of Amazons more than 1.55 million employees, but that hasnt deterred a thousand people at the company from voicing their concerns, and potentially risking their jobs. Beyond Amazons own workforce, around 2,400 people including students and workers at other major tech companies issued their own letter of support. All of this is daunting, but none of it is inevitable, the Amazon letters authors wrote. A better future is still very much within reach, but it requires us to get real about the costs of AI and the guardrails we need.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||