ChatGPT – a revolution? If so, it is only making small steps. Nearly three-quarters of French people have never tried this artificial intelligence (AI) text-generating tool, according to an online survey by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) conducted in April. Of the sample of populations from six countries surveyed, only the Japanese seem even less attracted. Lack of knowledge, difficulty of access, mistrust or distrust: the reasons are multiple.
Even among the French who have tried it, the question of the appeal of conversational AI is divisive: according to the RISJ survey, nearly half of the French who have tried ChatGPT have abandoned the tool after one or two attempts, while a third of them use it at least once a week. How could the same tool so quickly enter the daily lives of so many French people and still remain so useless in the eyes of so many others? To understand this, we launched a call for testimonials to which 180 readers responded. WorldHe then conducted a series of interviews with students from a variety of courses, but who all had in common having tried ChatGPT or its competitors, Gemini and Copilot.
Distrust and annoyance
Among our more skeptical witnesses, there are already those for whom the first contact validated a mistrust: after having verified the observations that these tools are able to make with great confidence in solid French, they noticed approximations or even “hallucinations”: false citations, false rulings by the Court of Cassation, false university sources, etc. For many, the energy spent in checking each answer, each text, neutralizes the very objective of the programs that are supposed to save time. “I quickly forgot to use it” sums up Martine Checa, 70 years old.
The question is not only about truth, but also about quality. Among those who resist, we find many perfectionist users, who have a passionate relationship with what they produce. For them, it is simple: the texts generated by AI are simply less good than those they could produce themselves. “It has been seen and seen again, testifies Gabrielle Laget, a 43-year-old history teacher and painter. I asked ChatGPT to make my artist profile and the result was flat and repetitive. I asked him to imagine a science fiction story, it was boring and exaggerated. For me it is the Magimix of creation: it is sold to us as the magic tool that does everything, but it only makes soup. » Some, disappointed with these programmes, also deplore their language, which they find insipid compared to their own style. Others even regret having to make up for the shortcomings of their own texts. “My limited uniqueness suits me better: I am me, a human being,” a reader testifies.
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