1 in 4 Citizens Use Generative AI, Paid Users Increase 7-Fold

Last year, 1 in 4 citizens in our country tried generative artificial intelligence (AI), and the number of users who paid for AI services increased 7-fold compared to a year ago.
The Korea Communications Commission and the Korea Information Society Development Institute (KISDI) announced on the 29th the results of the '2024 Intelligent Information Society User Panel Survey' based on this content. The survey was conducted on 4,420 people aged 15 to 69 across 17 cities and provinces nationwide who use the internet at least once a day.
24.0% of respondents said they had experience using generative AI, nearly doubling from 12.3% the previous year. The experience of subscribing to paid AI services surged to 7.0%, more than 7 times the 0.9% of a year ago.
In 2023, the majority of AI usage was for text generation (81.0%), but last year it diversified to text generation (57.2%), voice/music generation (21.4%), and image generation (11.8%). The motivations for using AI were 'efficient for information search' (87.9%), 'helpful in supporting daily tasks' (70.0%), and 'need someone to converse with' (69.5%).
On the other hand, the reasons for not using AI were 'seems difficult to use due to the high level of knowledge required' (65.2%), 'concerns about personal information leakage' (58.9%), and 'seems complicated to use' (57.3%), indicating concerns about usage difficulty and personal information leakage.
Users most frequently selected 'disclosure of content selection criteria of the algorithm' (69.8%) as the ethical responsibility required of AI recommendation service providers. This figure increased by 16.0 percentage points compared to 2022 and by 7.0 percentage points compared to 2023, indicating a continuous increase in users' demand for the right to know about the operation of recommendation algorithms, according to the Korea Communications Commission.
Respondents generally viewed the algorithm recommendation services provided by portals and YouTube positively. The most common reason for this positive view was 'well tailored to my preferences' (72.1% for portals, 71.3% for YouTube).
Regarding concerns about algorithm recommendation services, in 2023, 'value bias' (49.9% for portals, 51.0% for YouTube) was the most cited reason, but last year, 'concerns about exposure to illegal information' (47.4% for portals) and 'concerns about personal information leakage' (48.2% for YouTube) were the most frequently mentioned.

solidkjy@fnnews.com Koo Ja-yun Reporter