The BasePeople

Aaron Chatterji

Duke University Fuqua School of Business and OpenAI

Titles as the sources gave them. In 1 entry, with 5 checked quotations.

What they said

Newest first. Each quotation was found word for word in the source.

“We find steady growth in work-related messages but even faster growth in non-work-related messages, which have grown from 53% to more than 70% of all usage.”
How People Use ChatGPTNBER, September 2025. Speaking as: Other. The abstract: how the share of consumer ChatGPT messages unrelated to work changed; the body dates the 53% to June 2024 and the 73% to June 2025.
“Writing is the most common use case at work, accounting for 40% of work-related messages on average in June 2025.”
How People Use ChatGPTNBER, September 2025. Speaking as: Other. The introduction, on what users do with ChatGPT at work, from the classified sample of messages.
“Work usage is more common for educated users in highly-paid professional occupations.”
How People Use ChatGPTNBER, September 2025. Speaking as: Other. The abstract: who uses ChatGPT for work, from aggregated employment and education categories matched through a data clean room.
“Our sample includes the three consumer plans (Free, Plus, or Pro). OpenAI also offers a variety of other ChatGPT plans (Business fka. Teams, Enterprise, Education), which we do not include in our sample.”
How People Use ChatGPTNBER, September 2025. Speaking as: Other. Footnote 5: the study covers consumer plans only, not the plans that businesses, enterprises and schools use.
“Our categories often apply to the user’s intention, rather than the text of the conversation, and as such we never directly observe the ground truth.”
How People Use ChatGPTNBER, September 2025. Speaking as: Other. Section 5: the authors on their message categories, which apply to the user's intention and are best-guess inferences, not directly observed.

In the Base

Every entry they appear in.

  1. ResearchNBERWrote it

    How People Use ChatGPT

    An NBER working paper by mostly OpenAI-affiliated authors uses automated classifiers, with no person reading the text, on a random sample of consumer ChatGPT messages. The authors report that messages unrelated to work grew from 53% to 73% of daily volume between June 2024 and June 2025, and that writing is the most common work use.