New report shows the truth of how people actually use AI chatbots

Artificial intelligence is increasingly being shoved into everything, but AI chatbots in particular have exploded in popularity lately.

Companies like OpenAI and Microsoft are pushing the likes of ChatGPT and Copilot to provide you with answers to all of your questions, while companies like Amazon use AI chatbots to guide you through the shopping experience in hopes of scoring sales.

But how are people actually using AI chatbots?

A new report by The Washington Post aims to answer that question. The newspaper analyzed research data from nearly 200,000 English-language conversations from the WildChat Dataset, a database of over 1 million real-world user conversations with ChatGPT.

Unsurprisingly, AI chatbots are mostly used to aid in creative writing and role-playing, with a whopping 21 percent of all conversations falling into this category. If you’ve ever used ChatGPT to help come up with—or flesh out—ideas, then you know what we’re talking about.

Also unsurprising is the fact that younger users are embracing AI chatbots to aid in schoolwork, with 18 percent of all conversations pursued for help on homework and projects.

In third place with 17 percent of ChatGPT conversations, we have searches and queries that are similar to what you’d see on traditional search engines like Google.

Related: ChatGPT has its own AI-powered search engine now

On the surprising side, we have only 15 percent of conversations relating to work and business, only 7 percent having to do with programming and coding, and only 6 percent for image generation.

Not shown in The Washington Post’s chart is that over 7 percent of all conversations were sexual in nature. This includes both child-prohibited role-playing and requests for AI-generated sexual images.