According to the analytics firm’s report, worldwide desktop and mobile web traffic dropped by 9.7% from May to June, and 10.3% in the US alone. Users are also spending less time on the site overall, as the amount of time visitors spent on chat.openai.com was down 8.5%, according to the reports.
The decline, according to David F. Carr, senior insights manager at Similarweb, is an indication of a drop in interest in ChatGPT and that the novelty of AI chat has worn off. “Chatbots will have to prove their worth, rather than taking it for granted, from here on out,” Carr wrote in the report.
Personally, I’ve noticed a sharp decline in my usage. What felt like a massive shift in technology a few months ago, now feels like mostly a novelty. For my work, there just isn’t much ChatGPT can help me with that I can’t do better myself and with less frustration. I can’t trust it for factual information or research. The written material it generates is always too generic, formal, and missing the nuances I need that I either end up re-writing it or spending more time instructing ChatGPT on the changes I need than it would have taken me to just write it myself in the first place. Its not great at questions involving logic or any type of grey area. Its sometimes useful for brainstorming, but that is about it. ChatGPT has just naturally fallen out of my workflow. That’s my experience anyway.
I think I have one of the few use cases that it is still useful for. I write textbook materials, the ability to have chatgpt write a short piece of writing saves me a lot of time. For example, ‘write an 80 word passage for a 2nd grade A1 esl learner about visiting grandma. Use the present simple tense.’
Or, make ten cause and effect sentences involving animals that live in the forest.
But even with those very simple prompts, I have to check it and usually ask it to change some vocabulary.
However, if I ask it to do anything with logic or even slightly complicated, it can’t do it, so I always wonder what the heck people are using it for.
For example, ‘list all the elephant and piggie books and fly guy books in order of AR level’
It can’t do it. Thats a pretty basic task, but it gets it completely wrong.
That’s been my experience with AI as a language learner. Maybe it’s made worse because my target is one of the lesser used languages, but I think it’s really just not there yet.
Tried to trip it up with synonyms and it had a 10% hit rate, so that was worrying. Asking it how to order a plain coffee predictably netted me a phrase that translated to whithered café. Then it failed basic questions about colors.
If I’m going to google it, might as well google it. I think most of my use with AI language learning would be having a sentence to fact check.
As a language teacher, I am not concerned in the slightest. Actually, I think we will be one of the last jobs standing in the war with AI due to the complexities and fluid nature of language. Couple that with the human element of teaching, after all, language is means of communication with people, not robots, and I am confident.
Lots of people disagree though, so I could well be wrong. We will see.