Pew study finds AI image tools lag far behind chatbots among Americans

Pew Research Center’s survey of 5,119 U.S. adults, fielded from Feb. 17 to 23, 2026, found that only 24% say they use AI to create or edit images or videos. That is the number photographers should keep in mind the next time AI noise swamps the feed: image tools are still a minority habit, even as chatbots have become routine for far more people.

Pew’s broader June 17 report shows how wide the gap has become. About half of U.S. adults now use AI chatbots, up from 33% in 2024, and 49% say they use them at least occasionally. Another 24% use chatbots daily, while ChatGPT was the best-known product in the survey at 44% usage. For photographers, that split matters. It says AI is already showing up in parts of the workflow that are text-first, like brainstorming, caption drafts and search, but the image-making side is still far from universal.

The public mood around AI helps explain why. Pew found that only 16% of Americans think AI will have a positive impact on society over the next 20 years, while 40% expect a negative impact. About two-thirds think AI is moving too fast. Confidence is thin, too: 67% have little or no confidence in the U.S. government to regulate AI effectively, and 59% have little or no confidence in companies developing AI responsibly. That skepticism lands directly on photography, where trust, authorship and provenance are already part of the job.

The industry has started moving in that direction. Adobe’s Content Authenticity Initiative says it is building on the C2PA Content Credentials standard, and says nearly 200 policymakers, technologists, media leaders and platform representatives gathered at its Singapore Content Authenticity Summit in 2026. Getty Images also announced a multi-year display agreement with OpenAI on June 21, but the deal did not say whether Getty content can be used to train future OpenAI models.

That unresolved question is the part photographers should watch. Getty has also been locked in a copyright fight over AI scraping, including litigation alleging roughly 12 million images were scraped to train an image generator. So while chatbot use has clearly gone mainstream, the creative-image market is still stuck between experimentation and adoption. Pew’s numbers make that plain: the hype is loud, but for image generation, the habit has not caught up.