Simon Willison’s Weblog

4th August 2024

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.