Has the novelty of generative AI worn off?

It’s difficult to believe that just over 6 months ago, “ChatGPT” was not something that anyone even knew existed. But since its launch late last year, it has been the hot topic of so many conversations and news articles. The reality is that generative AI was nothing new but ChatGPT made it accessible and somewhat fun.

It even kicked off a search war between Google and Bing with both launching their AI chatbots so as not to appear to be getting left behind. I can only image the fear within Google seeing these new tools potentially eating into their lucrative search dominance. It may have seemed like the “Nokia/iPhone” moment for Google!

But, you may have noticed that things have gone a little quiet. There are less news articles about generative AI, there is less chatter and some of that initial buzz has definitely faded. In fact, an independent source last week estimated that after traffic to ChatGPT plateaued, it has now started to decrease. A recent survey of SEOs also showed that most are no longer interested in the new Google generative AI experimental results in the US.

Whilst these tools definitely have some very powerful business use cases, for the vast majority of people, on a day to do basis, they don’t. We are possibly seeing the initial novelty wearing off although these tools will evolve and they are here to stay. I suspect quite strongly that Google will reevaluate how it integrates generative AI into its search results, if the early signs are that it’s not actually what people ultimately want from a search engine.

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