Thinking Inside the Bot

ChatGPT is everywhere. But is it a blessing or a curse?

- By TANISHA SAXENA

What do Arjun Mehta, caught in a relationship dilemma, and Priya Sharma, a student at Delhi University, have in common?

Both have the “bot”. They turned to the same source for help—Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, or ChatGPT. For Arjun, who admits he was “spiralling like a Shakespearean hero” over a girl he was dating, ChatGPT didn’t offer a cheesy pickup line or a cliché like “just move on.” Instead, it served up a disarming question: “What’s your goal—connection, or reassurance?” That pause gave him perspective. On the other hand, Priya went down the slippery slope. During the mid-semester exams, she found herself overwhelmed. Desperate and short on time, she asked ChatGPT to write a 1,500-word essay for her assignment. A week later, her professor called her in. “This doesn’t sound like you,” he said. After further questioning and a review by the academic committee, she was suspended for the semester, her scholarship was withdrawn, and her academic record flagged.

There was a time when advice lived in very human places. You cried on a friend’s shoulder, argued with a parent, scribbled down your worries for a therapist, or nervously dialed your doctor. These days, people are skipping all that and typing their most personal questions into a ChatGPT chat box. A bot becomes confidant, coach, sounding board, and sometimes even relationship referee.

A new paper from OpenAI, Harvard, and Duke reveals that while ChatGPT now has 700 million weekly users sending 2.5 billion messages daily, its usage has shifted from primarily work-related tasks to more personal and informational queries. Also, by mid-2025, ChatGPT users shifted from being predominantly male to majority female, with nearly half of messages coming from users aged 18-25. Usage is growing four times faster in low-income countries than in high-income ones.