March 20, 2025
Published in March 2025, this was two studies run in parallel rather than one. MIT Media Lab researcher Cathy Fang and colleagues ran a four week randomized controlled trial with close to 1,000 participants using ChatGPT daily. Separately, OpenAI analyzed roughly 40 million real ChatGPT conversations for patterns, without any human reviewer reading the content, to see how often people engaged emotionally with the chatbot in normal use.