AVASH NEWS: Artificial Intelligence is no longer a future-related concept. It has entered the everyday life of people very gradually. Similar to the Internet, which turned from an unknown technology into an inseparable part of Iranians’ lives two decades ago, AI tools are now following the same path. The difference is that the speed of this evolution is much higher.
The fresh findings by Iranian Students Polling Center )ISPA( have drawn an interesting image of this transition. Today, about 98 percent of Iranians have access to the Internet, and Iranian users are present in the virtual space for more than 4 hours a day on average. However, still about 38 percent of people do not know anything about AI. But on the other side of this story, a more important event is occurring; among people who are using AI tools, more than 90 percent have selected ChatGPT as their main tool.
These figures are not only digits and diagrams. They speak of a deeper shift; a shift that may be the most important development of the Internet in recent years. If users entered Google to find answers to their questions and searched among tens of links, today many prefer to ask their questions of an AI assistant and receive their answers immediately in the same place. Therefore, this article is more about changes in the behavior of Iranians than about ChatGPT itself.
The demographic characteristics of the respondents
Over the past two decades, the criteria of digital development have changed in Iran several times. Once, the main question was how many people had access to the Internet in Iran. Years later, Internet speed, the quality of the connection, and the rate of social network use turned into the main indicators. However, it seems the main question today is how many people are using AI today.
This shift is not just the replacement of one technology with another. The Internet used to connect users with information, but AI tries to analyze, summarize, and recreate the same information. In other words, if the Internet was a window to the world of information, AI is turning into an assistant that looks for information instead of the user and puts the blocks of data together and makes them ready as an answer.
For the same reason, many analysts think of generative AI as the biggest evolution since the emergence of search engines. In the same way, Google changed the way people accessed information in the early 2000s; now tools like ChatGPT are changing the way humans interact with information. The most important difference is that this time users are not necessarily looking for a “link”; they are looking for an “answer.”
ISPA findings show that the Iranian community has gradually entered this phase. Although a significant number of people still have no experience of using AI, among those who have entered this world, the use of these tools has expanded very significantly, signifying a new wave of digital evolution which, sooner or later, will include more of the community.
Still 38 percent lag behind
One of the main findings of this poll may not be the rate of ChatGPT use but the 38 percent who are not familiar with AI.
The figure signifies a new digital gap; a gap that is different from the gaps in the past decades. In the first years of the Internet’s expansion, the digital gap meant inequality in having access to the Internet; some had access to the Internet and some did not. Later, this gap was linked to the quality of the connection, the speed of the Internet, and access to online services. But today, in some countries, a new concept has emerged: the AI Gap.
The gap is not just about having a smartphone or the Internet. Two individuals may have access to high-speed Internet, a cell phone, and an active presence on social networks. But one may use AI for learning, producing content, programming, translation, analyzing data, and doing chores, while the other does not even know such tools exist.
This very difference can widen gaps in the future, making them even deeper than the Internet gap. Because AI is not merely a new software; it is a tool that influences learning styles, work, decision-making, and even competition in the job market.
ChatGPT, the most popular AI among Iranians
Findings by ISPA indicate that ChatGPT is by far the best-known and the most used AI tool among Iranian users. This is while across the world, other tools including Perplexity, Copilot, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek are also popular.
Is it time to say goodbye to Google?
Are the ways people find answers changing? For more than three decades, Google has been the most important gate to the world of information for users. Google provided tens or hundreds of links, and the user had to search through different sources and find an answer after comparing the links and selecting the best answers.
However, AI tools have changed this pattern. Now, many users are not looking for a list of websites; they want to talk to a digital assistant directly, write their question, and receive an answer immediately, and in case of any ambiguity, they ask again. Because of that, many technology analysts have talked about the transition from “search engines” to “answer engines.”
This does not mean the end of Google, though. Still, breaking news, searching for pictures, online shopping, finding valid scientific sources and maps, and many other Internet services are still based on search engines.
