University of Iowa professors found more people use artificial intelligence, or AI,  tools for personal use than for the workplace, following the preliminary results of a national survey.

The UI team aims to have the survey results published in an academic paper by the end of February, Kenneth Brown, a management professor in the Tippie College of Business, said.

Brown said school use was counted as workplace activity. Brown and his team worked with the UI Social Sciences Innovation Center and Verasight, a data firm that conducts polling, to send out the survey to 1,000 respondents across the country.

Brown said more than half of the respondents who use AI said they use it for personal activities such as crafting a workout plan or baking a recipe, while only one-third of the respondents said they used it in the workplace.

One-fourth of the respondents were retirees, and over 70 percent of them used ChatGPT or Google Gemini for personal use, Brown said.

Drew Jauron, a Ph.D. student in the Tippie College of Business and a contributor to the survey, said roughly 250 respondents were not familiar with AI tools or had never used them. Jauron said 20 to 30 people indicated a strong dislike for AI tools.

Brown said he, along with Jauron and associate professor Brian An in the College of Education, helped design the study.

Brown said he is proud of the fact that the 1,000 people surveyed give a good representation of the average U.S. adult, including different populations like retirees and part-time workers. 

“It’s a pretty darn good representation of U.S. adults,” he said. “We’re not just looking at people who are working. We’ve got some students in there. We’ve got some people who are part-time gigging. It’s a really nice sample of people.”

Brown said he was most surprised to find the high use of AI tools among retirees, something which surprised his co-researcher, An, very little. Brown said An told him on a personal phone call that his parents often use AI to break down complex issues such as foreign policy that they see on the news. 

Brown said AI language models can explain concepts in natural language and can bring society closer to having personal digital assistance which science fiction is fascinated with. 

“We’ve been thinking for a long time about the idea of personal digital assistance. I found Siri to be very limiting in what she can do for me, I certainly don’t have any robots in my house,” he said. “This feels like a meaningful step towards having a personal digital assistant.”

Brown said the lower number of workforce use with AI could be a product of companies taking time to begin to understand and permit AI use such UI’s use of Microsoft Co-Pilot. 

“The University of Iowa has partnered with Co-Pilot, but we didn’t throw Co-Pilot at students the minute that it was available,” he said. “We did some research, we studied, we had to worry about costs. There are a lot of companies that are experimenting and exploring applications of AI.”

Jauron said that, for personal use, AI is the most focused web search for information source in history, following the advent of the internet and Google. Jauron said he has used AI to greater effect than Google to help brainstorm personal projects, such as mixing cocktails. 

“It’s really starting to replicate human expertise in many ways,” he said. “The danger is, if you’re using it in place of human expertise in places where that’s still required.”

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Jauron said many people in the survey mentioned using AI for understanding health and medical information, and while he said it was helpful if they didn’t have an immediate medical provider, he worries for long-term results, such as the possibility that people will rely on the tool more than their experiences and abilities. 

Jauron said he was also interested in retirees using the software more than working adults of a younger age did. Jauron said he believes younger generations in the survey who relied less on AI than retirees were making a deliberate choice not to use it as heavily.

 “In our younger generations, I think there’s a strive for authenticity and creativeness,” he said. “There’s a desire to have real experience. We’re seeing live events rise in popularity again. I think there’s some individuals reacting against AI because they see it as fake.”

Ivy Santeler, a second-year UI student, said she refrains from using AI entirely, only getting her information online from search engines like Google. 

Santeler said while she believes AI can be a good resource, it can’t be traded for human contribution in fields like her chosen major of visual art and journalism. 

“It’s being implemented too much,” she said. “There’s areas of life, like visual art and journalism, where I just really don’t see the point in outsourcing human contribution, and so I just don’t use it.”

Santeler said in a world dictated by social media, which centers around appearances, always turning to AI to avoid being wrong can be harmful in learning environments like college. 

“That’s really the point of college, or the point of education in general, but especially secondary education, is to apply your own ideas even if they’re wrong or not the most developed,” she said. 

Seth King, an associate professor of special education in the College of Education, recently wrote an article explaining how schools are starting to use AI in special education due to staff shortages and limited funding.

King said though the survey had a lower use of AI in the workplace compared to personal use, he believes special education has been implementing the tool with deliberate speed. 

King said in recent summers, the Office of Special Education Program has hosted get-togethers in which a speaker walks educators through how one could use AI for lesson planning.

“This is different than just saying those tools are out there,” he said. “This is almost advocating for its use. And then there are lots of pieces, practitioner-level pieces, telling people how to use it.”

King said the balance between using AI for the workplace and home projects will most likely vary across professions, even as the technology continues to expand, highlighting their personal over workplace use finding.

“If you are a taxi driver, but you’re using AI, it probably doesn’t have a lot of direct applications to your profession,” he said. “That finding is somewhat different than what I’m seeing. I would also add that there are some differences in what professions their expectations are.”

Jauron said he hopes the results of the survey will spark future research on aspects like how people are medically relying on AI tools over doctors, and the effects of students learning information from quick summaries from AI rather than reading a textbook.

“There is just a call for more recognition that this is just becoming a part of people’s lives,” he said. “We need to grapple, as a society, as people with what roles it is playing in our life.”