Higher ed, primary ed, and homework were all subcategories ChatGPT classified sessions into, and together, these make up ~10% of all use cases. That’s not enough to account for the ~29% decline in traffic from April/May to July, and thus, I think we can put a nail in the coffin of Theory B.
It’s addressed in the article. First, use started to decline in April, before school was out. Second, only 23 percent of prompts were related to education, which includes both homework type prompts, and personal/professional knowledge seeking. Only about 10 percent was strictly homework. So school work isn’t a huge slice of ChatGPTs use.
Combine that with schools cracking down on kids using ChatGPT (in classroom assignments and tests, etc), and I don’t think your going to see a major bounce back in traffic when school starts. Maybe a little.
I’m starting to think generative AI might be a bit of a fad. Personally I was very excited about it and used ChatGPT, Bing, and Bard all the time. But over time I realized they just weren’t very good, inaccurate answers, bland writing, just not much help to me, a non programmer. I still use them, but now it’s maybe once a day or less, not all day like I used to. Generative AI seems more like a tool that is helpful in some limited cases, not the major transformation it felt like early in the year. Who knows, maybe they’ll get better and more useful.
Also, not super related, but I saw a static the other day that only about a third of the US has even tried ChatGPT. It feels like a huge thing to us tech nerdy people, but your average person hasn’t bothered to even try it out.