UC Berkeley's Jessica Dai finds r/ChatGPT posts show a sharp rise in emotional attachment and therapy seeking after GPT-4o

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?)

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!)

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

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