I haven’t really mentioned ebb and flow to data streams, but it’s not that different from what we see in nature. Birds migrate. Elephants migrate. Whales migrate.

Users migrate. Sure, they move from application/service to application/service, but during the day they are more likely to use certain software/services. Then we get into weekdays and weekends, with the holidays…

People use different stuff at different times. So ChatGPT has noted such a migration and it I found it mildly disturbing:

ChatGPT is losing users for the first time ever, and those users aren’t who you would expect. Traffic to ChatGPT’s website fell by 9.7% in June, according to estimates from Similarweb, a web analytics firm. The decline was steeper in the U.S., with a 10.3% month-on-month decline, and the number of unique visitors to ChatGPT also fell by 5.7% from the previous month.

One thing is clear to Francois Chollet, a software engineer and AI researcher at Google, who told Fortune over email that “one thing is sure: it’s not booming anymore.”

Chollet thinks he knows what’s going on: summer vacation. Instead of using ChatGPT for education-related activities, the engineer said on Twitter, kids are probably playing Minecraft or enjoying summer activities. Search interest over time for ChatGPT has steadily declined, while search interest for Minecraft has steadily increased, he pointed out. 

“ChatGPT suddenly ‘isn’t booming anymore,’ Google A.I. researcher says—and kids are the big problem“, Fortune.com, Stephen Pastis.

It’s noted in the article that doing homework is what ranks 2nd of ChatGPT’s use. Personally, I’ve got a really bad history about doing homework, so I get it, but are we truly punishing people by giving them bad grades who say, “Nope, I didn’t do it” to those who have ChatGPT do it? Honesty is being penalized again?

Honesty, integrity – all those things Disney remakes stories about that we have kids sit down and watch gets penalized if they don’t have ChatGPT do their homework?

This isn’t like the calculator, which took away some of the drudgery of math. ChatGPT, prompted properly, can do an entire assignment in moments, paste that into a spreadsheet…

And we have just trained primates to copy, paste, and not learn anything while those that might want to learn actually are at risk of getting lower grades.

I thought school was bad in my day…