Seventeen months ago, Shopify mandated AI through its organization. But just last week its CEO complained about “slop grenades” - the AI-generated work that outsources mental effort to colleagues. AI might well be capable of achieving superintelligence, but superlaziness might be more relevant in some organizations.
Scroll down to read about The Avengers, what Gen Z really think about AI-generated content, and the latest battle humanity has lost against the machines.
Stats to power your week
🔮In May we asked consumers what they thought AI would be capable of before 2030, and the benchmarks keep tumbling well before the deadline. Just after OpenAI seemingly cracked the Navier-Stokes Problem, an AI tool beat humans in a forecasting competition for the first time - something only 3 in 10 were expecting to happen by 2030, never mind 2026. GWI Pulse
🪙Thanks to some recent high-profile resignations among AI researchers, attention has been drawn to the effective altruism community - a movement with an intense focus on making efficient contributions to good causes. It’s a good moment to ask: what actually makes people donate to charity? 43% are motivated by the effectiveness aspect, sure, but that’s matched by the 44% who donate based on a personal connection to the cause. Results matter, but people give to what they identify with. GWI Pulse
📜28% of Gen Z say they’re fine with AI content in their social feeds if it’s labelled, and the same number say they dislike it under any circumstances. All other generations are more likely to be content with AI in their feed, so long as it is clearly labelled - so this is one technology where young people aren’t in the vanguard. GWI Pulse
🧠A nifty little survey we ran recently let us do something interesting: see how users of ChatGPT’s free tier feel about it, compared to users on its paid plans. Probably the biggest headline is how much paying leads people to trust it more - 52% of paid tier users describe ChatGPT as trustworthy, vs. 22% of free tier users. But how much of that comes from the extra intelligence, and how much is justifying the investment? GWI Pulse
Meet the audience: Marvel fans
Without GWI data
With GWI data
“Avengers: Doomsday” will be released later this year, marking the first instalment in the Avengers franchise since 2019. That year also saw the high watermark of Marvel fandom in our research, when 37% of the online population identified that way, a figure that’s since dialled back to 29%.
But even if we take a look at this more dedicated audience that’s stuck with the franchise since, it’s not quite the figurine-collecting, convention-attending stereotype you might expect. Thanks in part to a young age profile, it’s a diverse group, with Black Americans and Hispanics over-indexing for Marvel fandom.
Some behaviors are in-line with assumptions - they’re almost twice as likely to read comics and 67% more likely to attend conventions. But, if we may use an analogy from elsewhere in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, its fandom includes Miles Moraleses as much as it does Peter Parkers.
Chart of the week
This week’s chart is a two-fer. First you’ll notice that ChatGPT’s first-mover advantage in enterprise AI has been chipped away by Gemini - benefiting from integration with Google’s pre-existing workplace tools - and Claude.
But there’s a second story here, which applies to the whole market: regardless of tool, workplace adoption of AI seems to be topping out somewhat. First with ChatGPT and now with Gemini, you can see the distinctive S-curve of technological diffusion. And the diffusion model is a good one to keep in mind even as AI capabilities increase - for even as the technology improves, new constraints appear as they become integrated within pre-existing systems, as the Shopify anecdote at the start of this newsletter shows.
More from GWI
Ad sellers have been on the vanguard of the demand for self-serve, AI-boosted insights, but they’ve largely been left to fend for themselves. So we recorded a webinar to help you guys out.
