1 in 2 Citizens Experience AI in Daily Life... Most Common in Residential Convenience Sector

Ministry of Science and ICT's '2023 Internet Usage Survey'
AI Experience Rate by Age: Under 20 Ranks 1st at 66%

One in two South Korean citizens has experienced artificial intelligence (AI) services in their daily lives.

According to the "2023 Internet Usage Survey" conducted by the Ministry of Science and ICT on the internet usage environment, usage rate, and usage behavior of households and individuals in Korea, the experience rate of AI services in daily life reached 50.8% last year. This figure has steadily increased over three years, recording 32.4% in 2021 and 42.4% in 2022. The daily life sector includes residential convenience, education and learning, transportation, and communication.

The Ministry of Science and ICT explained that this survey analyzed changes in the public’s internet usage behavior due to a major turning point in internet life brought about by the emergence of generative AI services such as ChatGPT.

The AI service experience rate by age group was 66% for ages 6 to 19, 61% for those in their 20s, and 65.8% for those in their 30s, indicating that AI services are rapidly becoming a part of daily life, especially among younger generations.

The daily life sector where AI is most frequently experienced is residential convenience (20.8%), followed by transportation (16.6%), education and learning (14.6%), and communication and socializing (12.9%). This reflects the trend of AI-based services and autonomous driving programs being embedded in the latest home appliances and automobiles, as well as AI functions being added to educational software.

The experience rate of generative AI, included for the first time in the survey questions, was 17.6%. Among those aged 40 and under, more than one in five used generative AI services. The usage rate was highest among people in their 20s at 33.7%, followed by those in their 30s (28.2%), ages 12 to 19 (22.8%), and those in their 40s (20.1%).

The fields of use were simple information search (79.5%), document work assistance (36.7%), foreign language translation (28.7%), creative and hobby activity assistance (8.6%), and coding and program development (4.8%), in that order.

The internet usage rate among seniors aged 60 and over (within the last month) was 81.1%. Among them, the internet usage rate for those aged 70 and above was 64.4%, up 9.7 percentage points from the previous year, and SNS usage rate was 26.4%, up 5.3 percentage points from the previous year.

When asked about the purposes of internet use for those aged 70 and above, education and learning (33%) and job seeking and work performance (12.8%) were noted.

Song Sang-hoon, Director of Information and Communication Policy at the Ministry of Science and ICT, stated, "As digital deepening accelerates, AI technology is already becoming a part of the public’s daily life," adding, "We will discover and promote various policy tasks so that AI technology can become an innovative driving force for the national economy and society."