OpenAI study finally reveals how people actually use ChatGPT

A first-of-its-kind study has revealed how people actually use OpenAI’s hugely popular artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT.

Since launching in 2022, the AI tool has grown to more than 700 million users – or “nearly 10 per cent of the world’s adult population”, according to OpenAI. Until now, the way this vast userbase has been using the app has been largely anecdotal.

The new study, by OpenAI’s Economic Research team and Harvard economist David Deming, analysed 1.5 million conversations with ChatGPT to track consumer usage.

OpenAI said the findings showed that conversations typically focus on everyday tasks “that create economic value through both personal and professional use”, with the company calling on AI to be treated as a “basic right” for people.

“ChatGPT consumer usage is largely about getting everyday tasks done,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post announcing the study.

“Three-quarters of conversations focus on practical guidance, seeking information, and writing – with writing being the most common work task, while coding and self-expression remain niche activities.”

It is the first study to use internal ChatGPT message data, for which OpenAI said privacy-preserving techniques were used to protect user data.

The researchers found that the majority of people use ChatGPT for tasks and queries that are unrelated to work, with only 30 per cent using it in a professional capacity.

“Overall, our findings suggest that ChatGPT has a broad-based impact on the global economy,” the researchers wrote in the study.

“The fact that non-work usage is increasing faster suggests that the welfare gains from generative AI usage could be substantial... Within work usage, we find that users currently appear to derive value from using ChatGPT as an adviser or research assistant, not just a technology that performs job tasks directly.”

One unexpected finding from the study was that men and women use ChatGPT for different reasons.

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Users with more typically feminine names are more likely to use the artificial intelligence tool for practical guidance and writing assistance, while those with typically masculine names more often use it for technical help and multimedia.

Despite ChatGPT’s meteoric growth since launching in November 2022, it is now facing significant competition from its rivals.

Google’s AI chatbot Gemini recently overtook ChatGPT to become the most popular iPhone app in the UK and the US.

The tech giant attributed the sudden surge in new users to the success of its new image model, known as Nano Banana, which appears to surpass many of the limitations of OpenAI’s tools like DALL-E.