Gen Z’s Favourite AI Tools Have Been Revealed, and They Might Surprise You

Reckon you can guess what AI tech young people stan, and which ones they’ve never even heard of?

Since the launch of ChatGPT last year, it feels like everyone, everywhere is talking about AI.

Is it good? Is it bad? Will it turn into robots who take over the world (just kidding 👀)?

Through all the chatter though, Gen Z are actually engaging with AI pretty often and they’re using it for all kinds of reasons.

We asked 576 young people about AI for our survey, “Young People’s Perception and Use of Generative AI” and they dished all the tea on how, where and when they use it, plus what concerns them most about AI.

But we know what you came here to find out – what AI is Gen Z actually using?

Drum roll please…

Taking the crown is ChatGPT.

Okay, nothing too shocking about this one.

We’ve gone into detail about ChatGPT-3 here, and covered the updates from ChatGPT-4 here to get you up to speed.

It’s by far the most popular AI tool with the young people we spoke to, no matter their age or gender, with 49 per cent of participants using it regularly or sometimes.

And the runner-up is… Canva AI.

A long way behind in second place is Canva AI – specifically, their Magic Write and AI Image Generator functions – with 13 per cent of Gen Z using it on the reg.

If you haven’t got around it already, the AI Image Generator will transform your words into a painting, a photo, even an abstract kind of concept artwork.

On the other hand, Magic Write (powered by the forces behind ChatGPT, OpenAI) is more of a text generator so you can input a prompt and turn it into copy, a list, a socials caption, a letter, even a poem if you’re feeling prose-y.

In third place, we have Microsoft Bing AI.

Microsoft Bing AI also uses the same tech as ChatGPT and it’s pretty impressive – which is probably why 11 per cent of Gen Z are using it often.

You can refine your searches and then ask follow up questions to ensure you get what you’re looking for, and request summarised answers from what is usually an infinite (and overwhelming) number of search results.

You can even ask for them to be given to you in words a five-year-old could understand, which sounds like a service we could honestly make good use of.

Rounding out the top four, DALL-E.

Ah, our old friend DALL-E, who takes inspiration from artwork to turn ideas into images, which seven per cent of the young people we spoke to take advantage of regularly.

In case you missed our explainer of the AI image generator, you can check it out here.

Brace yourself though, because some of the creations to come out of DALL-E are the stuff of nightmares.

(YOUNG PEOPLE’S PERCEPTION AND USE OF GENERATIVE AI)

What about the ones no one had even heard of?

There were a bunch of Generative AI tools most participants admitted to never having heard of before and honestly… same.

Three-quarters of the young people we spoke to had no knowledge of Midjourney or YouChat, and 78 per cent of participants had never heard of Bard or Stable Diffusion either.

Then there were a few even more young people hadn’t heard of, like ChatSonic (80 per cent), Chinchilla (85 per cent), LLaMA (86 per cent), Jukebox (81 per cent).

You can check out more of our articles on artificial intelligence here, or download the report to find out about Gen Zs’ use of Generative AI.