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Welcome to the Friday edition of our newsletter. We spend Friday’s going deeper into tools and trends related to generative AI (and Tuesdays sharing news updates). This week we’re sharing results from last week’s reader survey and how they compare to our student survey…

🍖 Sign up for FREE AI Lunch Club events

Our AI Lunch Club series returns this spring with four FREE virtual events to help you better understand generative AI tools. Click each link to get more info and to register:

• Feb. 9 - Get Started with Generative AI

• Feb. 16 - Google Gemini, Nano Banana and NotebookLM

• Feb. 23 - Building Microsoft Copilot Agents

• March 4 - Vibe coding with Claude, ChatGPT and Lovable

AL Lunch Club events are offered free thanks to a sponsorship from technology and management consultancy, Lean TECHniques.

👋 Hands-On With Gen AI Workshop Feb. 27

Are you ready to actually build things with generative AI? Sign up for our Feb. 27 Hands-On With Generative AI Workshop at Drake University (or attend virtually) and complete six AI projects in six hours. Save $70 if you sign up by Feb. 13.

Survey: How our readers feel about Gen AI

In last Friday’s newsletter, we reported how the students currently enrolled in our generative AI class feel about generative AI, comparing this year’s results with those we received from our students last year.

Over the past week, a number of you completed a similar survey (a version targeting professionals instead of college students). In today’s newsletter, we’re going to dive into this second set of results.

What our readers said

First, we asked how many of you have used generative AI tools. 100 percent of respondents claim to have previously used the tools, which is the same rate we received from our students.

How often do our readers use generative AI tools? According to survey results, a whopping 61% use the tools daily, with half of that group using the tools multiple times per day. By comparison, 47% of students use the tools daily, with less than a third of that group using the tools multiple times a day. At least by the lights of the survey, there is a larger proportion of gen AI power users among our readers than there is among our students.

As for which tools our readers use most, like our students, ChatGPT is the most popular choice, followed by Gemini.

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More survey results

79% of readers taking the survey feel very positive or somewhat positive about generative AI tools in general, while a bit more than 73% of our students feel that way.

45% of the surveyed readers feel very positive or somewhat positive about the idea of using generative AI for schoolwork, while only 38% of students hold that view.

As for whether using generative AI for schoolwork is ethical, our readers came in at 79%; our students came in at a similar rate of 83%.

Here’s the breakdown of how our readers use generative AI, with the student percentages listed in parentheses for comparison:

• Research - 70% (also 70% of our students)

• Writing assistant - 70% (vs 63% of our students)

• Generative ideas - 70% (also 70% of our students)

• Things you used to Google - 52% (vs 47% of our students)

• Editing - 46% (vs 47% of our students)

• Creativity - 40% (vs 50% of our students)

• Enhanced learning - 30% (also 30% of our students)

• Fun and nonsense - 21% (vs 47% of our students)

• Healthier living - 18% (vs 23% of our students)

• Coding or programming - 15% (vs 20% of our students)

• Therapy/companionship - 6% (vs 3% of our students)

These percentages are remarkably close to one another, with a few exceptions: college students use the tools for the purpose of creativity at a slightly higher rate, and college students use gen AI tools for “fun and nonsense” at a considerably higher rate than our readers, surprising precisely no one.

Here’s another interesting one: 83% percent of our students expect to use generative AI at their first job after graduation, but a whopping 97% of readers expect current college students to use generative AI tools in their first job after graduation.

Finally, whereas 20% of our students have used generative AI as a therapist, the proportion for our readers is even lower, coming in at 15%.

What do these numbers ultimately tell us? Well, these aren’t exactly scientifically rigorous surveys, so we can’t draw any definitive conclusions.

But despite many similarities across the results of the two surveys, two noticeable differences are in the higher rate of use of generative AI tools among our readers, consisting largely of professionals, compared to our students, and the higher expectation for the use of generative AI tools in the students’ first job when comparing the reader responses to the student responses. I suspect the professionals know something our students don’t, at least not yet: generative AI is already part of the job, not something waiting in the future.