What do people really ask chatbots? It’s a lot of sex and homework. Jeremy B. Merrill and Rachel Lerman at the Washington Post analyzed WildChat, a dataset of 1 million ChatGPT-style interactions collected and released by the Allen Institute for AI.
From a random sample of 458 queries they categorized the conversations as 21% creative writing and roleplay, 18% homework help, 17% "search and other inquiries", 15% work/business and 7% coding.
I talked to them a little for this story:
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a piece of technology that has this many use cases,” said Simon Willison, a programmer and independent researcher.
Recent articles
- Highlights from the Claude 4 system prompt - 25th May 2025
- Live blog: Claude 4 launch at Code with Claude - 22nd May 2025
- I really don't like ChatGPT's new memory dossier - 21st May 2025