With 68% of consumers reporting using AI to support their decision making, voice is making this easier. [1]
Does anybody actually believe that 68% of consumers use or even want Copilot? But they included a source for this very generous assertion at the bottom of the page:
[1] Based on Microsoft-commissioned online study of U.S. consumers ages 13 years of age or older conducted by Edelman DXI and Assembly, 1,000 participants, July 2025.
Oh yeah, that’s compelling: US consumers, 13 years old and older. An entire thousand of them!
So the only question I have left is which junior high principal Microsoft “compensated” for this survey, and what happened to the 320 summer school attendees who said fuck you, no anyway.
When google shoves their ai to the top of search results, its hard not to read it. I’ve been spoiled by ublock and I am no longer used to ignoring the first few things that come up.
I’ve been using Duckduckgo with uBlock for years, so I had no real problems with anything like the hell of Google “sponsored content” until Duckduckgo started putting up their own AI search assistant. Since then I’ve gone from start.duckduckgo.com to noai.duckduckgo.com because I got tired of turning their search assist off and couldn’t reliably block it with uBlock because they kept changing it. (I delete all cookies after every browser session and do not maintain individual app accounts, so their AI settings options were never gonna work for me.)
Because of the way my brain works, I literally don’t even want to see what AI says until I’ve done my own looking. Yet I never failed to turn it off, because I just can’t rely on it.
Usually when I’m looking for something I’m in a hurry, so it’s less trouble for me to just pick my own sources, preferably older than 2023 if possible, and read a bit myself than to spend time getting blithely lied to, or even just suspect hallucination/omission to the point that I think I need to verify it before I can rely on it.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that for me, it is literally faster to skim three or four completely different primary sources than it is to try to verify the assertions in a single search assist paragraph: one is just light reading, the other is point by point comparison of the AI offering against multiple independent sources. So I read.
I’ve never regretted summarizing a topic myself, but I’ve definitely gotten some rotten eggs from AI, both in blatant non-truths AND in holes of omission you could drive a truck through. I won’t make that mistake again. So for me, AI summaries are well worth staying wary of for now.
Maybe Marginalia could work for you? I’ve tried using it, but it’s a lot more focused on academic stuff (rather than figuring out song lyrics or which episode some TV quote came from). It’s an “old school” search engine, though, so a bit less convenient than google, duckduckgo, etc. if you weren’t around in 90s/early 00s for that.
Yeah like we all use chatGPT for the most part now but that still does not mean copilot
Fun fact though out of topic: I once searched for 2 girls one cup in copilot, and though it said I cant talk about it, it provided sources and one of them was a link to the video
Also just because you have used AI doesn’t mean its overly useful. Gone to ChatGPT multiple times to try getting information that Google now is too shit to provide, and ChatGPT ends up providing some stupid response that is clearly wrong.
Occasionally used ChatGPT to find a website to use as an actual source, but now those sources are also AI written bullshit that is clearly wrong. Which is increasingly concerning because while I know some things are wrong, I don’t know everything. How many other things that it points to are wrong? Its not too bad if you are able to verify it through non LLM sources, but what if you can’t?
It’s the newspaper (news site or app now) problem. You read the news from your venue of choice, taking it all in, sorting out how you feel about it, maybe pick a side on an issue. Then you turn the page and there it is. An article about your career field in A.
Wow, you might think, they got this so wrong. They clearly have no understanding of A. You might even get angry about it.
Yeah, I’d believe it. Outside of anti-AI circlejerks people like AI, especially ones like ChatGPT, and especially if it is available right at their fingertips. It’s quickly becoming a part of everyday life and processes.
The anti-AI people need to start accepting that today and every day after it is going be the day that AI plays the smallest part in humanity’s future. The genie is out of the bottle and it’s never going back in. The sooner they can accept that and let go of the hate and see it for what it is - a useful tool to help you - the better and less angry their lives will be.
How useful is it really? I constantly hear about it being wrong and I’m not so stupid that I can’t handle a search through Wikipedia on my own.
Why should accept this thing that is of such little benefit to my life? Why should I accept this thing that is constantly wrong? Why should I accept this thing that just allows uncreative and insecure people to fill the internet full of garbage?
If you need AI as it is to help you do things then I pity you greatly.
Ok but we know that it’s very often wrong and tries too hard to make you feel good instead of actually giving correct answers. It makes up reasons for made-up sayings, often struggles with math, and has a whole host of other issues while acting fully confident in its infallibility. We have several studies that seem to show that its use is having a negative affect on ohr critical thinking skills as well. After all that it doesn’t even provide a service that’s worth anything even if it didn’t come with all those downsides. Using a search engine just isn’t that difficult and AI “art” is a goddamn cancer.
It’s terrible for us and we don’t even need it! No, fuck “AI”. We have a big enough problem with people trying to find the easy way out to such a degree that they refuse to learn how anything works and slapping a big “do it for me” button on everything is just insane. I’m not saying that everything needs to difficult but we are so averse to even the slightest challenge that it leaves us with nothing but a complete lack of basic skills and an assload of insecurity.
AI is a tool. It’s not a person, it’s not a be-all-end-all of anything. Just like a person can use excel and come up with the wrong numbers, people can use AI and come up with the wrong answer.
Just like with every tool, there are people who can’t use them properly, there are people who are good enough to get modest results, and there are people who are experts at their craft who can do amazing things with them. AI is no different.
If you want a calculator, use a calculator - not AI. Use the right tool for the job and you’ll get the best result.
Studies can be made to say anything, and I know the ones you are talking about - they’re bogus.
Except that anyone who can use it properly can also just do the job without it, and the amount of damage it is doing because it’s freely available to everyone is insane.
You’re completely ignoring all my arguments. This sorta makes sense since your original reply was very “just ignore the bad stuff and it’s good!” but you’re going to have to address those things. I meanc, you did say “they’re bogus” and then not elaborate at all, but I’m assuming that if you have the energy to continuing writing comments then you would also have the energy to do the far more efficient thing and show me why those studies are bogus, right?
I think the more important thing, is for people to push to make AI a public good, rather than a corporate hegemony. If corporations are the sole creators and holders of AI, they will do all sorts of terrible things with their mastery. Publicly developed and open-sourced AI that is free for anyone to use, is important.
The refusal for the public to truly make AI their own, would be akin to letting corporations to control every single printing press.
You make a good point, and the end of this movie remains to be seen (though I agree that right now it looks like AI is here to stay).
I use AI pretty regularly to check for holes on some extremely long compliance documents for work, and the results in terms of not missing parts and reducing the time of the task is amazing, to say the least.
However, this is very different from having an agent controlled by MicroShit seeing everything you do in what is supposed to be YOUR computer, and giving it all to MicroShit to do God knows what with your data.
Yes, AI is currently the new smartphone boom, but there are many ways to use it without showing up completely naked in front of these assholes, especially since you’re not even given an option to cover yourself.
I think it’s important to still give a critical eye towards the use of AI, but at this point I think it’s clear that not only is the use of AI going to stop (even once the bubble bursts), but also that the top-end models are just becoming more and more capable every month.
A couple years ago I was giving GPT-3 complex prompts and laughing at how bad and error-prone the output was, but last week I was using GPT-5 to give me information in a field I have little knowledge of, and it’s giving me perfect answers in seconds that takes me 20+ minutes to verify as correct, and that’s tens of times faster than actually learning the field myself. Even if I were to take a year to learn it all myself, I’d then need to not only retain all of that information, but also keep up-to-date on advancements in that field, which an AI will just do over time. This way I can concentrate on the fields of work I already know and follow, but can dabble in other fields without expensive retraining or bugging others in those fields with basic questions.
I’m not sure what your point is. There are many people that like AI but don’t like Copilot. So a statistic of people liking AI is not equivalent to a statistic of people liking Copilot. That’s like saying people love my baking because people like baking in general, even though I didn’t ask anyone about my baking in particular.
So what’s your point? That not everyone likes copilot? No shit. My point was that there isn’t a “vast difference” between using/liking copilot and “AI” as you said there is.
Does anybody actually believe that 68% of consumers use or even want Copilot? But they included a source for this very generous assertion at the bottom of the page:
Oh yeah, that’s compelling: US consumers, 13 years old and older. An entire thousand of them!
So the only question I have left is which junior high principal Microsoft “compensated” for this survey, and what happened to the 320 summer school attendees who said fuck you, no anyway.
They got that 68% usage number likely by counting everyone accidentally using it after a search swap or similar trick.
they are equating “AI support” with “I want AI copilot integrated into my OS”
and that’s a big leap
When google shoves their ai to the top of search results, its hard not to read it. I’ve been spoiled by ublock and I am no longer used to ignoring the first few things that come up.
I’ve been using Duckduckgo with uBlock for years, so I had no real problems with anything like the hell of Google “sponsored content” until Duckduckgo started putting up their own AI search assistant. Since then I’ve gone from start.duckduckgo.com to noai.duckduckgo.com because I got tired of turning their search assist off and couldn’t reliably block it with uBlock because they kept changing it. (I delete all cookies after every browser session and do not maintain individual app accounts, so their AI settings options were never gonna work for me.)
Because of the way my brain works, I literally don’t even want to see what AI says until I’ve done my own looking. Yet I never failed to turn it off, because I just can’t rely on it.
Usually when I’m looking for something I’m in a hurry, so it’s less trouble for me to just pick my own sources, preferably older than 2023 if possible, and read a bit myself than to spend time getting blithely lied to, or even just suspect hallucination/omission to the point that I think I need to verify it before I can rely on it.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that for me, it is literally faster to skim three or four completely different primary sources than it is to try to verify the assertions in a single search assist paragraph: one is just light reading, the other is point by point comparison of the AI offering against multiple independent sources. So I read.
I’ve never regretted summarizing a topic myself, but I’ve definitely gotten some rotten eggs from AI, both in blatant non-truths AND in holes of omission you could drive a truck through. I won’t make that mistake again. So for me, AI summaries are well worth staying wary of for now.
My favorite is when AI summary answers a question, then the links from the search below contradict that answer. It’s shit for biomedical research.
Maybe Marginalia could work for you? I’ve tried using it, but it’s a lot more focused on academic stuff (rather than figuring out song lyrics or which episode some TV quote came from). It’s an “old school” search engine, though, so a bit less convenient than google, duckduckgo, etc. if you weren’t around in 90s/early 00s for that.
Yeah like we all use chatGPT for the most part now but that still does not mean copilot
Fun fact though out of topic: I once searched for 2 girls one cup in copilot, and though it said I cant talk about it, it provided sources and one of them was a link to the video
I can’t judge you for that, I feel like you probably got the very best Copilot has to offer, lol
Also just because you have used AI doesn’t mean its overly useful. Gone to ChatGPT multiple times to try getting information that Google now is too shit to provide, and ChatGPT ends up providing some stupid response that is clearly wrong.
Occasionally used ChatGPT to find a website to use as an actual source, but now those sources are also AI written bullshit that is clearly wrong. Which is increasingly concerning because while I know some things are wrong, I don’t know everything. How many other things that it points to are wrong? Its not too bad if you are able to verify it through non LLM sources, but what if you can’t?
It’s the newspaper (news site or app now) problem. You read the news from your venue of choice, taking it all in, sorting out how you feel about it, maybe pick a side on an issue. Then you turn the page and there it is. An article about your career field in A.
Wow, you might think, they got this so wrong. They clearly have no understanding of A. You might even get angry about it.
And then you read the next article.
Yeah, I’d believe it. Outside of anti-AI circlejerks people like AI, especially ones like ChatGPT, and especially if it is available right at their fingertips. It’s quickly becoming a part of everyday life and processes.
The anti-AI people need to start accepting that today and every day after it is going be the day that AI plays the smallest part in humanity’s future. The genie is out of the bottle and it’s never going back in. The sooner they can accept that and let go of the hate and see it for what it is - a useful tool to help you - the better and less angry their lives will be.
We put the leaded gasoline genie back into its bottle, time to put the AI slop genie back into its bottle too!
How useful is it really? I constantly hear about it being wrong and I’m not so stupid that I can’t handle a search through Wikipedia on my own.
Why should accept this thing that is of such little benefit to my life? Why should I accept this thing that is constantly wrong? Why should I accept this thing that just allows uncreative and insecure people to fill the internet full of garbage?
If you need AI as it is to help you do things then I pity you greatly.
You’re constantly hearing negative stuff, exaggerations, and lies most likely - especially if you are hearing it on places like this.
Ok but we know that it’s very often wrong and tries too hard to make you feel good instead of actually giving correct answers. It makes up reasons for made-up sayings, often struggles with math, and has a whole host of other issues while acting fully confident in its infallibility. We have several studies that seem to show that its use is having a negative affect on ohr critical thinking skills as well. After all that it doesn’t even provide a service that’s worth anything even if it didn’t come with all those downsides. Using a search engine just isn’t that difficult and AI “art” is a goddamn cancer.
It’s terrible for us and we don’t even need it! No, fuck “AI”. We have a big enough problem with people trying to find the easy way out to such a degree that they refuse to learn how anything works and slapping a big “do it for me” button on everything is just insane. I’m not saying that everything needs to difficult but we are so averse to even the slightest challenge that it leaves us with nothing but a complete lack of basic skills and an assload of insecurity.
AI is a tool. It’s not a person, it’s not a be-all-end-all of anything. Just like a person can use excel and come up with the wrong numbers, people can use AI and come up with the wrong answer.
Just like with every tool, there are people who can’t use them properly, there are people who are good enough to get modest results, and there are people who are experts at their craft who can do amazing things with them. AI is no different.
If you want a calculator, use a calculator - not AI. Use the right tool for the job and you’ll get the best result.
Studies can be made to say anything, and I know the ones you are talking about - they’re bogus.
Except that anyone who can use it properly can also just do the job without it, and the amount of damage it is doing because it’s freely available to everyone is insane.
You’re completely ignoring all my arguments. This sorta makes sense since your original reply was very “just ignore the bad stuff and it’s good!” but you’re going to have to address those things. I meanc, you did say “they’re bogus” and then not elaborate at all, but I’m assuming that if you have the energy to continuing writing comments then you would also have the energy to do the far more efficient thing and show me why those studies are bogus, right?
I think the more important thing, is for people to push to make AI a public good, rather than a corporate hegemony. If corporations are the sole creators and holders of AI, they will do all sorts of terrible things with their mastery. Publicly developed and open-sourced AI that is free for anyone to use, is important.
The refusal for the public to truly make AI their own, would be akin to letting corporations to control every single printing press.
You make a good point, and the end of this movie remains to be seen (though I agree that right now it looks like AI is here to stay).
I use AI pretty regularly to check for holes on some extremely long compliance documents for work, and the results in terms of not missing parts and reducing the time of the task is amazing, to say the least.
However, this is very different from having an agent controlled by MicroShit seeing everything you do in what is supposed to be YOUR computer, and giving it all to MicroShit to do God knows what with your data.
Yes, AI is currently the new smartphone boom, but there are many ways to use it without showing up completely naked in front of these assholes, especially since you’re not even given an option to cover yourself.
I think it’s important to still give a critical eye towards the use of AI, but at this point I think it’s clear that not only is the use of AI going to stop (even once the bubble bursts), but also that the top-end models are just becoming more and more capable every month.
A couple years ago I was giving GPT-3 complex prompts and laughing at how bad and error-prone the output was, but last week I was using GPT-5 to give me information in a field I have little knowledge of, and it’s giving me perfect answers in seconds that takes me 20+ minutes to verify as correct, and that’s tens of times faster than actually learning the field myself. Even if I were to take a year to learn it all myself, I’d then need to not only retain all of that information, but also keep up-to-date on advancements in that field, which an AI will just do over time. This way I can concentrate on the fields of work I already know and follow, but can dabble in other fields without expensive retraining or bugging others in those fields with basic questions.
what was it specifically?
There is a vast difference between people using/liking AI and people using/liking Copilot.
Not really. Copilot is AI, and people will be made aware that it’s available everywhere in Windows.
I’m not sure what your point is. There are many people that like AI but don’t like Copilot. So a statistic of people liking AI is not equivalent to a statistic of people liking Copilot. That’s like saying people love my baking because people like baking in general, even though I didn’t ask anyone about my baking in particular.
Oh are there? Where’s your source?
Any primary school math textbook will do as a source and tell you not all rectangles are squares, even if a square is a rectangle.
So what’s your point? That not everyone likes copilot? No shit. My point was that there isn’t a “vast difference” between using/liking copilot and “AI” as you said there is.