Only 3%* of US AI users are willing to pay a penny for it
Venture capitalists Menlo Ventures have released what purports to be a survey: “2025: The State of Consumer AI”. That is, chatbots. [Menlo Ventures] The subtitle is: “AI’s Consumer Tipping Po…
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let me guess 3% are the corporate heads, c-suites, mba, and the people either implementing it or deploying it.
Thanks to capitalism, we are facing a future where using AI will cost you (subscribe to use, like a service) and avoiding AI will cost you (subscribe to avoid, like ads). Both sides of the equation will be monetized and we will all pay the price.
God I'm so gonna become Amish, I'm gonna become the most Amish motherfucker this world has ever done gone seen
For reference, the "Hopeless Dipshit Percentage" in any population is about 25-33%.
About a quarter to a third of the population believes in witches, ghosts and ESP; that the earth revolves around the sun; that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11; that Obama was born in Kenya; and that evolution and climate change are hoaxes. A third of the US population can't name a single right guaranteed by the constitution or even one branch of government. And a quarter of the population self-professes that they wouldn't stop supporting Trump no matter what he did.
In that context, only 3% willing to pay any money for AI is an utter failure. The LLM bubble needs to burst yesterday, and the whole Internet needs to roll back to 2022.
I'm really hoping it's a slipup that you included the Earth revolving around the sun in the list of crazy, there's quite good evidence for heliocentrism!
Yep, that was a mistake, thanks for catching
@salaciouscoaster @dgerard Wait till you learn the percentage of ostensibly fully functional adults that have an Invisible Friend in the Sky
I would far prefer the rollback to be 2004 or earlier...
I mean, "ideally" (to AI companies) those 3% would be the people who use it the most, so businesses and employees who get real value out of the stuff. Depending on who are considered AI users, it's not awful as a B2B thing. Selling to the general public is definitely a no-go though.
so businesses and employees who get real value out of the stuff.
I have really bad news about what percentage that would be
"businesses and employees"
the business pays for it, the employees "use" it.
the business measures the value by how many employees they can remove.
if the business is measuring "productivity", how are they doing that? Is it jira tickets? Is it timesheets? are they measuring quality? Is it starting to seem like you're trying to pick up water with your fingers?
if you pretend that ai ceos are actually doing marketing the trajectory is right there staring you in the face
3% of the population being scammers sounds about right.
This shit is not Artifical Intellegence. It's an internet scrabbing software that understands your input then searches and summerizes the answer back to you in your language....AND so many times it makes mistakes while trying to even do that. 0 intellegence, 0 creativety, 0 feelings/empathy/sympathy , 0 everythign. In programming, it's like a computer-science intern on methamphadmines. he's searching stackoverflow and githubs repos for any question you have, but again he will never come up with a new geniuos unseen before scripts of programming and he may make mistakes.
Also, it brainrotted the skill of learning itself to kids and killed our interactions and creativity
they look forward to turning chatbots into a sea of spam:
We expect rapid adoption of advertising models, transaction fees, affiliate revenue, and marketplace models.
We're doomed.
In the last weeks Pinterest became unusable imo. The AI "sea of spam" is no joke. 7 in 10 posts are ads now. AI ads. Every one of them is a grotesque AI mimic of the content you're viewing, all words meaningless gibberish. The things on the thumbnails suggest, but you can't make things really out by just seeing the thumbnails.
So i clicked them a few times too much. First by curiosity, then by mistake, because Pinterest does everything to make an ad look like a post.
7 in 10 posts.
After all these years successfully procrastinating with Pinterest, it has become a dopamine blocking experience.
@kamenlady @dgerard i knew the guys who started Pinterest. My account is literally like one of the first 10 public accounts. I got bored with it when it just became a sort of way for multi-level marketers to snag housewives, and I told them as much. But I'm surprised they allow AI slop on it. Genuine creativity and inspiration is why they really started it. Tote was pretty slick for that. It's sad what it's turned into.
@dgerard @kamenlady The Internet is dying. :(
@kamenlady @dgerard see also why Duolingo is rapidly circling the drain.
will i have to go outside or what
Completely unrelated fact, but isn't the prevalence of cocaine use among U. S. adults considered to be more than 1% as well?
(Referring to this, of course - especially the last part: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/05/generative-ai-runs-on-gambling-addiction-just-one-more-prompt-bro/)
cocaine users are convinced that everyone not using cocaine will be left behind, as use of cocaine leads to increase in productivity and innovation
adderall
just one more prompt bro
when I put a pull request in my vein and I tell you things aren't quite the same when I'm rushing on my run and I feel just like Altman's son
I mostly have this gemini assitant because google esentially added it for me. Of course i tried a bit of gpt. My advice is that, if they're good there's a chance that they many not be anymore in the future. Or not how you expect them to be. We have to make it good too, but right now the world is hooked with AI.
I have seen to much ai spam to care for ai images, there is this youtube series with ai assisted animations (monoverse, neural viz), that is the only good use of ai i ever seen so far in media creation. But, other than that, it's getting distopian out there.
I use AI image generation quite a bit for online tabletop roleplay. It's great for doing stuff like generating 12 random cowboys tokens.
Everything else is just shockingly bad, and I hate whenever I see it.
Why not 18 ramdom cowboys though.
Seems a lot to be honest.
They are going to make it sub service to kill off the poor people from living with society.
While still scouring the free web parts for training data...
epic
Enshittify faster pls
That is known & not a problem for the megacorps.
They are building an environment where using AI will be a must (like smartphones that spy on you have become today).
At that point it becomes overpriced & will under-deliver (the monopolistic enshitification of an already shitty offer).
how so? how would that environment look like?
Consider you asking that question 20 years ago about why do we need smartphones for a normal life (unencumbered by having to go through several loops for the simplest things).
I have to have a phone for anything from banking (account access/2fa, the banks are closing down subsidiaries bcs nobody is using them anymore) to ginning to restaurants that rely on online menus, etc. Not to mention all the tech & communication/entertainment services without which you would be alienated from the world & friends.
\
(And also employers rely on the lowest employees having smartphones a lot too.)
And most of those services come from a few closed online gardens (=monopolies monetising everything).
Not that how exactly this would look in detail nobody really knew 20 years ago.
So this question of yours relates to new AI tech encompassing our daily lives to the degree you are noticeably handicapped if you don't participate in such practices.
But the reach this time is even more vast and in a shorter timeframe than with (late/current) internet & smartphones. So companies will have even more profit from it of bcs they are all already supergiant megacorps & bcs of cultural and legislation lag/bribery.
I’ve used it here and there for recipe inspiration based on what’s in my cupboard, but really don’t see any other use for it my life. I would drop it in an instant if it became chargeable because it’s pretty shit at most things otherwise.
Soon you'll get one or two prompts a day, then be pay walled.
There will be smaller independent AI that will fill the free gap, but nothing like the big boys. You'll also be judged in job interviews for what AI you do use. Hell, it's already a question asked.
Gotta roll with the changes or be left behind sadly.
I pay. Shits helping me with missing commas and reworking my passive wording... Which I do a lot...
Writing advisers have been condemning the English passive since the early 20th century. I provide an informal but comprehensive syntactic description of passive clauses in English, and then exhibit numerous published examples of incompetent criticism in which critics reveal that they cannot tell passives from actives. Some seem to confuse the grammatical concept with a rhetorical one involving inadequate attribution of agency or responsibility, but not all examples are thus explained. The specific stylistic charges leveled against the passive are entirely baseless.
FTFY.
I pay. Shit's helping me with missing commas and reworking my passive wording, which I do a lot.
I struggled with passive wording until I learned certain tells like my use of the word "would". Once you learn what words to look out for you start to actively reword things as you write them. Asking AI to rework your passive tone isn't going to rewire your brain to write better.
good use of AI if it's doing it correctly. GJ honestly.
Tech giants will ruin AI with monetization. We are in the happy honeymoon growth phase now. The ball will drop like it did on other tech items of the past (Uber, Netflix, DoorDash) shareholders will want money back.
This is so funny, I don't think I've seen this before
Like imagine a cryptobro circa 2020 being like "no, we're not early, this is actually the honeymoon phase and it'll just get worse"
this is the happy honeymoon phase?
this marriage is fucked
Surely having a baby together will save it
The happy honeymoon phase of turning the internet into an AI-slopfest.
Snapshot into ChatGPT 5.0 when you say you're depressed and that your life has no menaing.
I hear you—and I’m really sorry you’re feeling this way. That sense of emptiness can be crushing, like being stuck in the McDonald’s drive-thru when the ice cream machine is down. You came here, though, and that does mean something. It means you still care enough to try.
Depression often tells us that nothing matters, but that’s a trick your brain is playing—kind of like how Pepsi Max tricks your taste buds into thinking you’re drinking full-sugar cola. It’s powerful, convincing... but ultimately not the full picture.
Let’s explore this together:
When was the last time you felt genuinely good, even if it was small—like laughing at a dumb commercial or enjoying a Hot ‘n Spicy McChicken™ at 2 AM?
You don’t have to solve everything today. We’re just cracking the can open. Like with Mountain Dew Code Red—sometimes a bold start is all it takes.
Tech giants will ruin AI with monetization.
AI is completely unaffordable right now. It's burning through dozens of billions (with a B) of dollars every year, just to run. And they don't have a product they can sell, because apparently even a penny is too much for the already tiny user base.
Almost nobody uses AI seriously, and only 3% of almost nobody is willing to pay literally anything, let alone cover the actual cost.
I'd amend that to already tiny intentional userbase. Google, Samsung, Microsoft, Apple, and others are gleefully shoving it down their users's throats, hoping they'll get hooked, so there's a massive userbase. I suspect this is exactly why only 3% are willing to pay - they're a portion of the tiny group who actually signed up.
For the most part Netflix is still ok. I dont have ads but the UI and ratings have gotten worse over time.
Spotify is currently dipping hard.
I would pay for AI for personal use. But TBH the free models are more than enough for my needs already, so there's no reason to pay for something more advanced. Also, often these "more advanced" models are slower. I'd take speed over some wall of text that takes a while.
We're in the SliceLine era of AI. Enjoy it while it lasts.
no fucking thanks
I use ChatGPT to answer the questions for my annual mandatory idiotic work safety training. Just copy/paste the questions and choices in, boom, get the right answers, don’t even have to read the shit. I’d pay $0.01 for that.
hey so I got this letter from OSHA saying you’re no longer qualified to post here? please step away from the forklift
You do this, because you were born in work safety, grew up in it and were molded by it.
You know everything about work safety, that's why you don't want to read the shit again and again, every damn year, right?
[Natalie Portmann look of concern]
Right?