# Using ChatGPT

**Published by:** [The Digital Buffets](https://paragraph.com/@buffets/)
**Published on:** 2025-09-17
**URL:** https://paragraph.com/@buffets/using-chatgpt

## Content

OpenAI released its largest study to date on ChatGPT use two days ago, which analysed over a million anonymised conversations to track how consumer usage has evolved since ChatGPT’s launch three years ago. This is timely, given that ChatGPT has become one of the fastest growing internet consumer apps, as well as the poster child of AI tools today. Around 10% of the global adult population now use ChatGPT weekly, with daily message counts on the app reaching a whopping 2.6 billion in June 2025. For comparison, the number of Google searches averages upwards of 13.6 billion per day, as of January 2025. Curious about how people are using AI chatbots, I went to read the study in full, published as a working paper with the National Bureau of Economic Research in the US. While the study focuses on work-related usage of ChatGPT (notwithstanding that it excludes ChatGPT use on enterprise plans), I think its findings regarding non-work uses are more interesting. After all, as the study revealed, non-work usage of ChatGPT has grown much faster than work-related usage. Using an LLM to classify the sampled messages, the study found that non-work messages now make up nearly three quarters of messages on ChatGPT, up from about half a year ago.If it isn’t already clear by now, LLM-based AI tools like ChatGPT are as much of a consumer story as an enterprise one. How people use AI outside of work may very well prove to be more consequential than how they do so at work. On this note, there were another three findings from the study that caught my eye. Firstly, the use of ChatGPT remains largely utilitarian, but non-transactional use is increasing steadily. An overwhelming proportion of the messages sampled in the study (both work and non-work) were practical in nature. Using an LLM again to classify the messages, around 9 in 10 messages were deemed to have the intent of “asking” (48.9%) or “doing” (39.8%). The remaining messages (11.3%) were classified with the intent of “expressing”, defined as the negative of the first two intents, i.e. neither asking for information or asking the chatbot to perform a task. At the same time, “expressing” messages have increased by more than one-third over the past year. While this growth was from a very low base, we can infer a growing comfort among users to simply engage with ChatGPT without any explicit ask. Perhaps this might pave the way for them to subsequently build deeper, more expressive yet non-transactional relationships with the chatbot in the future?Secondly, the use of ChatGPT for companionship and social-emotional issues remains fairly small. Only 4.3% of all messages sampled in the study were categorised under the conversation topic of “self-expression”, and most of such messages were not work-related. More specifically, 2.0% were for greetings and general chitchat (e.g. messages like “how was your day?”), 1.9% for relationships and personal reflection (e.g. “my wife is mad at me, and I don’t know what to do”), and 0.4% for games and roleplay (this category includes messages asking ChatGPT to be one’s boy/girlfriend).That said, messages related to self-expression have also gradually increased over the past year. This growth is not much, but alongside the trend of increasing non-transactional use of ChatGPT, it suggests that ChatGPT is becoming more and more personal for users. I also note that the use of ChatGPT for both writing and technical help is declining, which I think are also the most abstract and least personally-oriented conversation topics in the study’s mapping.The findings here certainly put into perspective anecdotal reports of increasing numbers of people treating ChatGPT as a confidant, therapist and even romantic partner (see r/MyBoyfriendIsAI on Reddit for example). There’s no need to go into a panic anytime soon over AI psychosis afflicting society at large, but I do think we still need to take this trend of AI use becoming more personal and emotional seriously. In particular, the affective dimensions of AI use may disproportionately impact vulnerable groups such as children, those with mental health conditions and the elderly. Finally, while ChatGPT use is becoming more democratised, there could be emerging differences between how different social groups use it. The study specifically found that more educated users and those in highly paid professional and technical occupations were more likely to use ChatGPT for work. For instance, among users with some graduate education, 48% of their messages with ChatGPT across the entire time period of the sample were work-related, compared to 37% for users with less than a bachelor’s degree. The difference is less when adjusted for other characteristics (6% vs. 11%), but still statistically significant.Indeed, with ChatGPT and similar AI tools becoming entrenched as part of our digital lives, the focus now has to move from who uses these tools to how different groups use these tools differently. But beyond just finding out the extent to which different groups of people use ChatGPT for work or not, I think it is also worthwhile to dig deeper and investigate other more specific differences in AI usage. For example, do socio-economic factors like education, employment status and income have any significant bearing on how people use ChatGPT in their personal time? Do usage patterns in AI tools reflect or propagate existing class-based differences or even social inequality? These are just some questions we will have to consider if we want to make AI use truly inclusive, and more broadly, better appreciate the potential societal effects of such AI tools. In conclusion, this latest study by OpenAI suggests that ChatGPT, and LLM-based AI chatbots more generally, are becoming embedded more and more deeply within our personal lives. While most of us will continue to use these apps for tangible utilitarian purposes, there are signs that they may become more than just a tool—and perhaps doing so in different ways depending on our personal circumstances too.

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