Are You Already Giving Up on Gen AI? Here's How to Face the Disillusionment Phase

Recent data from Similarweb shows that ChatGPT's audience declined in June for the first time since OpenAI launched the platform in November last year.

The AI website received an impressive 152.7 million online visits in its first month. Seven months later, in May, it achieved an incredible 1.8 billion. However, the page lost 200 million visits in June, suggesting that interest might have peaked.

The Gartner Hype Cycle indicates that most technologies go through a phase of inflated expectations and enthusiasm followed by disillusionment with the hype when many initial users abandon them, at least temporarily.

It may be premature to conclude that Generative AI (Gen AI) is already facing this issue, but if it is, I suggest you not give up on it.

To genuinely understand what Gen AI can do, you need to make it part of your routine and test it as much as possible. Reading about it or even taking courses can be helpful, but most of the information at this stage is generic, and most people are still learning.

Based on my experience (so far) using Gen AI for communication work, I'm still very excited, and I have some insights that might help you survive the disillusionment phase and discover how it can better assist you:

• Understand and Rethink - As you gain experience at work, it's common to establish automatic habits and processes. You may stop questioning why or how you do things and repeat what has worked well enough in the past. Generative AI allows you to rethink your work routines and be more critical about why and how you do things. Because these tools require clear and exact prompts to work well, they force you to articulate your goals and detail your requests as if you were training someone to do your job. It not only can substitute or improve what you do, but it can also help to revamp it completely.
• Have Conversations - It initially feels strange, but once you start chatting with AI, it becomes more natural and faster than working with traditional link search. If you want to know something, a chat can be very illuminating. Gen AI can serve as a knowledgeable and tireless assistant who never gets frustrated with you. However, this doesn't mean you should accept everything the tool tells you (more about trust below), but it's usually a better starting point than link searches.
• Try Everything - You might think AI can't perform the most creative or complex tasks you have. The first time I used it for communication strategies, for example, my expectations were low. I was surprised by the ideas and suggestions it made. While it still needed critical analysis and improvements, it was much better than I had anticipated. Sometimes, the algorithm may get a simple piece of content very wrong, but you can also find yourself wondering how software can create a script for a Reel that's better than anything you've produced before. The only way to understand its possibilities and limits is to try it. More often than not, you will be surprised.
• It's Not All About Productivity - Although many suggest AI will make us much more productive, my experience indicates that it does not necessarily improve speed but can increase quality and allow me to spend my time more wisely. This is particularly true if your need is to create original ideas and content. For some tasks, like summarizing long transcriptions or suggesting dozens of titles, the tech does make you faster, but it may also prompt you to research more to confirm what it's saying. Finding the right balance of how much and when to use it is challenging, but it has almost always helped me do better work.
• Don't Trust It Blindly - Once you start talking to Gen AIs, it's hard to remind yourself that it's an algorithm with no intentions or autonomy and has no concept of lying. It is often so convincing in its answers that it's hard to believe that it can invent an entirely false theory or personality profile. But it can, and sometimes it does. That's why it requires so much human supervision, and why the idea that it will make us much more productive is still uncertain. However, it can make us much smarter. That alone makes it worth the effort.