Evaluating Artificial Intelligence Use and Its Psychological Correlates via Months of Web-Browsing Data

Despite widespread discussions about artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on society, little work has objectively measured how often people use this technology in the wild. The present article collected up to 90 days of web-browsing data from students (Study 1: N = 499) and those in the general public (Study 2: N = 455), quantifying how often people used AI and evaluating the psychological correlates of such use. Upon coding 4.1 million websites in Study 1 and 9.9 million websites in Study 2, the evidence suggested that AI use was relatively infrequent, totaling 1% of student web-browsing and 0.44% of general public web-browsing, on average. The most consistent predictors of AI use across studies were aversive personality traits (e.g., Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy), albeit the traits were differentially associated with AI use across studies. Demographics were largely unrelated to AI use across studies. Finally, we observed that self-reported AI use and actual AI use were only moderately correlated (ρ = 0.329), suggesting limitations in subjective measures of media use. These findings provide some of the first behavioral measurements of AI in naturalistic settings and establish important benchmarks for understanding the individual differences associated with AI adoption.