It doesn't say that. The actual question asked was whether people would pay extra for AI features, which isn't the same thing as asking if they want them.
If you look at the survey results, a few things jump out.
Firstly, there's a strong age skew. The people most likely to benefit from AI features in their software are those who are judged directly on their computing productivity, i.e. the young. Around half of 18-35 year olds say they would pay extra, even . It's only amongst the old that this drops to 20%.
Secondly, when asked directly if they value a range of AI-driven features, they say yes.
The skew opens up because companies like OpenAI give AI services away for free. There's just a really strong expectation established by the tech industry that software is either free or paid for by a low and very price-stable monthly subscription. This is also true in AI: you only pay for ChatGPT if you want more features and smarter models. For the majority of things that people are doing with AI right now, the free version of ChatGPT is good enough. What remains is mostly low value stuff like better autocomplete, where indeed people are probably not that interested in paying more for it.
Unfortunately Ted Gioia tries to use this stat to imply people don't want AI at all, which is not only untrue but trivially untrue; ChatGPT is the fastest growing product in history.
I pay for a subscription to a local news blog (because our local newspaper no longer covers local news). I would not pay for the same content delivered by AI. Does the blogger use AI to write his stories? I trust him when he says he does not but I guess I have no way to know for sure.
I will pay people for the value they create. I won't pay for AI content, or AI integrations. They are not interesting or valuable to me.
If you look at the survey results, a few things jump out.
Firstly, there's a strong age skew. The people most likely to benefit from AI features in their software are those who are judged directly on their computing productivity, i.e. the young. Around half of 18-35 year olds say they would pay extra, even . It's only amongst the old that this drops to 20%.
Secondly, when asked directly if they value a range of AI-driven features, they say yes.
The skew opens up because companies like OpenAI give AI services away for free. There's just a really strong expectation established by the tech industry that software is either free or paid for by a low and very price-stable monthly subscription. This is also true in AI: you only pay for ChatGPT if you want more features and smarter models. For the majority of things that people are doing with AI right now, the free version of ChatGPT is good enough. What remains is mostly low value stuff like better autocomplete, where indeed people are probably not that interested in paying more for it.
Unfortunately Ted Gioia tries to use this stat to imply people don't want AI at all, which is not only untrue but trivially untrue; ChatGPT is the fastest growing product in history.