UC Berkeley study of 100,000 Reddit posts finds GPT-4o sparked a rise in emotional attachment and therapy use

it's maybe(?) also obvious in hindsight that gpt-4o was uniquely problematic -- sycophantic etc -- but I think it's pretty wild that there’s such a marked increase in posts about therapy, companionship, & others that begins *almost immediately after the 4o release* in may 2024

we analyzed >100k posts from r/ChatGPT over 3 years

on one hand, we saw ChatGPT quickly become normalized as an everyday consumer product, which is pretty cool

on the other hand…

anyway I think this thread is already too long so let me end here by thanking my amazing collaborators - Sean Garcia, @beenwrekt, @2plus2make5, and @nhaghtal ♥️

arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05750 + one more plug for the website: https://rchatgpt-pulse.github.io/

we also made a little web app to explore our methods and results, including daily updates with new data :)

https://rchatgpt-pulse.github.io/

if anyone had been paying attention, we could have had evidence of this as early as oct 2024 -- to contextualize that timeline, I don't think conversations about 'emotional engagement' really took hold in the public sphere until much later (the viral rollback was in may 2025!)

I think these results are an example of why it's important to pay attention to how the broader public actually experiences AI, & not just pre-deployment tests

(...wouldn’t it be awesome if we had more intentional platforms to collect this kind of data?)

the oct '24 date is based on an extremely simple monitoring method we propose -- essentially, SAEs for unsupervised topic extraction + anytime-valid testing as a heuristic for when to raise alerts.

we give it a cute name ofc: PuLSE (public & longitudinal signals for evaluation)

@jessicadai_ Interesting! Daily survey data overlapping in time with much of your data: https://arxiv.org/html/2412.05163

@jessicadai_ Such cool work! Thanks for making the code available; it'd be nice to try out PuLSE on other AI-using online communities.

@jessicadai_ @beenwrekt @2plus2make5 @nhaghtal Hi! This is super interesting! I have been moderating the OpenAI Developer Community Forum during this whole episode and remember it vividly. March and April '25 were peak pressure for us. I think I can see early pointers in late '24 but we had no clue what was coming.

@jessicadai_ s/o @_arulm_ 🤓

@VeitB_X @beenwrekt @2plus2make5 @nhaghtal woah yeah, thanks for sharing

@jessicadai_ You might also be interested in QualLLM, a kind of complimentary LLM-labeling method used to understand how rideshare workers relate to AI. https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.05345 We used this method to study how government patent officers on Reddit reacted to AI use https://chi-staig.github.io/papers/submission22.pdf

@jessicadai_ what do you predict is coming next after modeling these trends? Such cool work

@jessicadai_ @beenwrekt @2plus2make5 @nhaghtal woooo so exciting to see the paper finally up 😁

@jessicadai_ @beenwrekt @2plus2make5 @nhaghtal We were always hoping that one day this situation would be 'resolved'. If you can help, you got my support! The topics and posts shared by the users are mostly still available in the 'ChatGPT Use Cases' category.

https://community.openai.com/invites/eYcAqnPiEt

@jessicadai_ @beenwrekt @2plus2make5 @nhaghtal Bro, please number your posts in the thread

@dbateyko really interesting work!! thanks for sharing

@jessicadai_ ngl, it's getting kinda weird out here.