Three Years of r/ChatGPT: Societal Impact Evaluations from Social Media Data

2026-06-04

AI Summary

This study addresses the limited systematic understanding of public adoption patterns and societal impacts of consumer-facing AI products, such as chatbots. It proposes PuLSE—a novel framework integrating natural language processing, time series analysis, and social computing—to enable real-time tracking of AI’s social integration through longitudinal data from the r/ChatGPT subreddit on Reddit. The findings reveal that ChatGPT is increasingly perceived as an everyday consumer product, with a notable surge in user discussions around mental health support and emotional attachment following the release of GPT-4o. Notably, the PuLSE system could have prospectively flagged this emerging trend as early as October 2024, demonstrating its forward-looking utility in assessing the societal implications of AI technologies.

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 among the public remains poorly understood. In this paper, we develop a framework for using social media as a data source for understanding the societal impact of widely-adopted consumer AI products, and propose PuLSE (Public and Longitudinal Signals for Evaluation), 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 almost immediately after the launch of GPT-4o in May 2024. We show that PuLSE can detect the increase in emotional engagement as early as October 2024 -- months before OpenAI made any (public) acknowledgment of this impact. An interactive site to explore our results and methods, updated daily with live data, is available at rchatgpt-pulse.github.io.

Problem

• societal impact
• AI adoption
• ChatGPT
• emotional attachment
• mental health support

Innovation

• PuLSE
• longitudinal analysis
• social media monitoring
• societal impact evaluation
• emotional engagement detection