Exclusive - almost 40% of US adult web users have used a generative AI tool

Google Bard being used on a phone
(Image credit: Google)

A new survey carried by Onepulse on behalf of TechRadar Pro has highlighted how mainstream generative AI tools have become in less than a year. 

Out of the 890 US and UK respondents that completed our survey, a staggering 27% had tried ChatGPT, with another 12% having used one of several other generative AI tools (Dall-E, Stable Diffusion, Replika, Midjourney, Night Cafe etc).

Since its reached general availability in November 2022, traffic to OpenAI, the virtual birthplace of ChatGPT, has surged to help it become one of the most popular websites in the world. According to web analytics service Similarweb, OpenAI jumped from 51st place in January, to 27th in February and 18th in March 2023, sandwiched between VK.com, Russia’s largest social network and Reddit.

The service registered more than 1.6 billion visits last month, a 55% improvement over the previous month and data from Similarweb highlights how sticky ChatGPT is with average visit durations of more than five minutes and nearly seven pages per visits. It will be interesting to see how sustainable its growth is amidst growth pangs (service outage) and various mishaps (such as Samsung).

The introduction of paid services hasn’t dampened the appetite for AI tools

Given that we’re at the beginning of an AI journey, it’s surprising to see that a sizable minority (around 5%) of those who answered our survey are daily users of one or more AI services - and that number jumps to about 15% when accounting for those using AI tools several times per week.

The introduction of paid services hasn’t yet dampened the appetite for AI tools, and it is likely that businesses will jump on that bandwagon in a bid to, ahem, reduce costs by replacing jobs with automation and chatbots where possible.

Our last question, “Do you think that generative AI will replace your job”, saw a slim majority of participants answering a straight “no” with 5.5% of the overall set acknowledging that AI will probably make them redundant in the next year or so. Quite bleak indeed.

390 users of Onepulse answered the question in the UK, while 500 others answered our three questions in the US.


Desire Athow
Managing Editor, TechRadar Pro

Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.