OpenAI has released its first research into how using ChatGPT affects people’s emotional wellbeing
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Summary
OpenAI and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab’s joint research found that although there are some differences in the way that males and females respond to ChatGPT, and that those who set the chatbot’s voice to a gender different from their own reported higher levels of loneliness and emotional dependency at the end of the trial, the majority of interactions with ChatGPT were not emotional.
Only a small group of ChatGPT users engage with the chatbot in an emotional way, with some averaging half an hour a day on the app, according to the study, which analysed real-world data from almost 40 million interactions.
“We use these emotion classifiers that we have created to look for certain things—but what that actually means to someone’s life is really hard to extrapolate,” said Kate Devlin, a professor of AI and society at King’s College London, who was not involved in the research.
The new research is an important step towards greater insight into the impact of ChatGPT, which could help to enable safer and healthier human-AI interactions, according to OpenAI policy researcher Jason Phang.