ChatGPT isn’t designed to replace or mimic human relationships, but people may choose to use it that way given its conversational style and expanding capabilities. Understanding the different ways people engage with models can help guide platform development to facilitate safe, healthy interactions. To explore this, we (researchers at the MIT Media Lab and OpenAI) conducted a series of studies to understand how AI use that involves emotional engagement—what we call affective use—can impact users’ well-being.

Our findings show that both model and user behaviors can influence social and emotional outcomes. Effects of AI vary based on how people choose to use the model and their personal circumstances. This research provides a starting point for further studies that can increase transparency, and encourage responsible usage and development of AI platforms across the industry.

We want to understand how people use models like ChatGPT, and how these models in turn may affect them. To begin to answer these research questions, we carried out two parallel studies1 with different approaches: an observational study to analyze real-world on-platform usage patterns, and a controlled interventional study to understand the impacts on users.

Study 1: The team at OpenAI conducted a large-scale, automated analysis of nearly 40 million ChatGPT interactions without human involvement in order to ensure user privacy2. The study combined this analysis with targeted user surveys, allowing us to gain insight into real-world usage, correlating users’ self-reported sentiment towards ChatGPT with attributes of user conversations, to help better understand affective use patterns.