Making sense of all the AI tools for regular non-technical people

[StringTheory97]

Getting this question from family and non-tech friends a lot lately and wondering if others have a good way of explaining it. The landscape has become genuinely confusing even for people who follow tech reasonably closely, let alone for someone who uses a computer mainly for email and occasionally wants to look something up.

The specific questions tend to be: which one should I use, are they safe, will they keep my information, what are they actually good for, and why do there seem to be so many of them doing the same thing.

I have some answers to all of these but I am not confident they are the right ones and I would like a simple honest explanation I can share with non-technical people without it becoming a 20-minute lecture.

[EntangledOne]

The single most useful reframe for non-technical people: think of it as a very capable autocomplete that has read a lot. Not a search engine, not a database, not a person. An extremely well-read autocomplete.

[RustyHawk]

On safety and data: the honest answer is that different tools have different privacy policies and you should not put anything into any of them that you would not be comfortable with the company potentially reading. That is the simple version.

[202694]

For most regular users the answer to 'which one' is: the one that is already in the thing you use. Siri on your iPhone, the assistant in your email app. The integration matters more than the underlying model for casual use.

[StuckOnDestiny]

The reason there are so many is the same reason there were many search engines in 2001. It is a competitive market and it has not consolidated yet. In five years there will probably be two or three dominant ones.

[Scott98]

The most useful honest answer to 'what is it good for' for non-technical people: drafting text, summarising long things, answering questions when you want a starting point rather than a definitive answer. Those three cover most real use cases.

[WWEGary20]

The biggest misconception I correct in non-technical people: they think it knows facts accurately the way a reference book does. It does not. It produces plausible-sounding text. For well-established facts it is usually right. For specific details it can confidently be wrong.

[Di46]

My honest recommendation for non-technical people who are curious: try asking it to help you write an email you have been putting off. That is the use case where it earns its keep fastest and where the stakes of it being wrong are lowest.

[Pilgrim]

The privacy concern is real and not irrational. Anyone who dismisses it as paranoia is wrong. Using these tools for publicly available information or creative tasks is lower risk than using them for anything personally sensitive.