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 can see where they’re coming from in terms of security, but that sounds a bit harsh.
At least where I work, we’re told basically “use it if you want, just be prepared for it to be wrong and double check everything it tells you” which sounds a little more reasonable IMO
Ironically, security isn’t a concern at all. With our relationship with Microsoft, we can use the Azure OpenAI API which, despite my own strong personal distrust in Microsoft, still meets all of our privacy and security standards. We trust Microsoft as much as we do our internal teams.
The concern is mostly legal/copyright related, as they’re worried any code or documents that come out of it could be considered copyrighted.
Wow that’s a very protective stance to take! Good reason though. There’s probably enough people out there actually copy + pasting the code that gets spit-out to have to worry about that. I try to only use ChatGPT to figure out syntax or get a high-level understanding of an approach to doing something, without having to scour the web for documentation.