Three Years of r/ChatGPT: Societal Impact Evaluations from Social Media Data
Jessica Dai, Sean Garcia, Emma Pierson, Benjamin Recht, Nika Haghtalab
Abstract
ChatGPT was launched on November 30, 2022; the r/ChatGPT subreddit was created just one day later. Since then, chatbot-based AI products have gone from niche proofs-of-concept to widely-used household names. However, the ways in which adoption has developed, especially among non-experts, remains poorly understood. In this paper, we propose a principled framework for using social media as a data source for understanding the societal impact of widely-adopted consumer AI products, as well as a general approach to monitoring for societally-impactful trends in real time. We apply our framework to conduct what is, to the best of our knowledge, the first longitudinal study of r/ChatGPT. We find that, overall, r/ChatGPT posts over time illustrate the normalization of ChatGPT as an everyday consumer product rather than an exceptional, novel technology. However, our retrospective analysis also finds that posts about using ChatGPT for mental health support, and posts about developing emotional attachments to ChatGPT, both rise steadily in frequency immediately after the launch of GPT-4o in May 2024. We show that our real-time method can detect the increase in emotional engagement as early as October 2024—months before OpenAI made any (public) acknowledgment of this impact.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{
dai2026three,
title={Three Years of r/Chat{GPT}: Societal Impact Evaluations from Social Media Data},
author={Jessica Dai and Sean Garcia and Emma Pierson and Benjamin Recht and Nika Haghtalab},
booktitle={Forty-third International Conference on Machine Learning},
year={2026},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=SPLfdwCL1J}
}