When I talk to people, from school students to middle aged employees, the common story is that they appreciate what AI can do for them when they choose to use it.

They are tired of hearing AI as a buzzword and having it shoehorned into every app and service they use. Most AI features have been rushed to market to check a box to say a company has an AI strategy, but they don’t work well. They’re just changing a familiar UI and popping up annoying notices.

Everyone also really doesn’t like consuming other people’s AI produced content. They associate it with slop on social media, fake headlines that tricked them, and low quality work their coworkers dump on them to waste their time. Everyone has a story about a coworker who is copying and pasting from ChatGPT everywhere at the office.

But most everyone thinks their own AI output is the exception: They like being able to type a couple sentences into ChatGPT and have it tell them something or produce some output that would have taken more time if they did it manually.