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.