ChatGPT remains by far the most popular AI tool, trailed by these less-famous but still widely used chatbots, image generators, and writing tools.
ADVERTISEMENTIn the past couple of years, there’s been an explosion of AI tools popping up online - and yet ChatGPT, whose appearance in our lives has sparked as much enthusiasm as controversy, remains the most popular existing tool, according to a recent study.
Researchers at writerbuddy.ai - an AI writing tool marketed at copywriters, bloggers, and marketers - found that ChatGPT, the free-to-use chatbot developed by OpenAI, claimed over 60 per cent of the share of the traffic for AI tools between September 2022 and August 2023, accumulating a total of 14 billion visits.
In total, writerbuddy.ai observed 24 billion visits to AI tools made by users worldwide in the same timeframe - a major growth from previous years.
According to the company’s findings, the AI industry experienced an average monthly traffic increase of 236.3 million visits.
But not all AI tools are receiving the same amount of love from users. And that might depend on the fact that the users are barely representative of the global population.
Which ones are the most popular tools after ChatGPT?
In the same period analysed by WriterBuddy, the second most popular AI tool after ChatGPT was chatbot Character AI, which obtained a total of 3.8 billion visits between September 2022 and August 2023.
AI writing tool QuillBot trailed Character AI with 1.1 billion visits, followed by image generator MidJourney with 500.4 million visits and data science tool Hugging Face with 316.6 million.
Bard, Google’s answer to ChatGPT, came sixth with 241.6 million visits in the same timeframe, followed by AI writing tool NovelAI with 238.7 million visits, video generator CapCut with 203.8 million, chatbot JanitorAI with 192.4 million and image generator Civitai with 177.2 million.
Who’s using these tools?
As well as noticeable geographical differences, there's a huge gender gap between those who are using AI tools and those who aren’t.
According to WriterBuddy's analysis, an overwhelming majority of users of AI tools in the period observed were male (69.5 per cent), while only 30.5 per cent were female.
This gap reflects the existing gender divide in the AI sector, where a majority of workers are male. According to the most recent data from the World Economic Forum (WEF), just 22 per cent of women make up AI professions globally.
In an interview with Euronews Next at Web Summit in Lisbon in November, Meredith Whittaker, the president of the messaging app Signal, said that the predominance of men in the AI sector is dangerous and a reflection of the patriarchal and misogynistic culture we live in.
"We want people in the room and we want the majority of the people in the room, in my view, to be those who will be most likely to be harmed by those systems," she said. "And right now, it's the opposite".
There’s also a huge difference in the origin of traffic for these AI tools.
The biggest part of the total traffic (22.62 per cent) came from the United States, for an overall total of 5.5 billion visits, while 8.52 per cent came from India, which was the source of 2.1 billion visits.
Among the top ten countries with the most AI users were also Indonesia (1.4 billion visits), Philippines (1.3 billion visits), Brazil (1.3 billion visits), United Kingdom (665 million visits), Japan (642 million visits), Germany (630 million visits), Mexico (579 million visits) and Canada (534 million visits).
Collectively, European countries had a combined 3.9 billion total visits, making the continent third after the US and India.
Most users of AI tools in the timeframe analysed by WriterBuddy (63 per cent), did
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