Here's an AI hype case study. The paper "The Rapid Adoption of Generative AI" has been making the rounds based on the claim that 40% of US adults are using generative AI. But that includes even someone who asked ChatGPT to write a limerick or something once in the last month. Buried in the paper is the fact that only 0.5% – 3.5% of work hours involved generative AI assistance, translating to 0.125 – 0.875 percentage point increase in labor productivity. Compared to what AI boosters were predicting after ChatGPT was released, this is a glacial pace of adoption. The paper leaves these important measurements out of the abstract, instead emphasizing much less informative once-a-week / once-a-month numbers. It also has a misleading comparison to the pace of PC adoption (20% of people using the PC 3 years after introduction). If someone spent thousands of dollars on a PC, of course they weren't just using it once a month. If we assume that people spent at least an hour a day using their PCs, generative AI adoption is roughly an order of magnitude slower than PC adoption. static1.squarespace.com/stat…