As AI chatbots see increased adoption and integration into everyday life, questions have been
raised about the potential impact of human-like or anthropomorphic AI on users. In this work,
the authors investigate the extent to which interactions with ChatGPT (with a focus on Advanced Voice
Mode) may impact users’ emotional well-being, behaviors and experiences through two parallel
studies. To study the affective use of AI chatbots, we perform large-scale automated analysis of
ChatGPT platform usage in a privacy-preserving manner, analyzing over 4 million conversations
for affective cues and surveying over 4,000 users on their perceptions of ChatGPT. To investigate
whether there is a relationship between model usage and emotional well-being, we conduct an
Institutional Review Board (IRB)-approved randomized controlled trial (RCT) on close to 1,000
participants over 28 days, examining changes in their emotional well-being as they interact with
ChatGPT under different experimental settings. In both on-platform data analysis and the RCT,
we observe that very high usage correlates with increased self-reported indicators of dependence.
From their RCT, they find that the impact of voice-based interactions on emotional well-being to
be highly nuanced, and influenced by factors such as the user’s initial emotional state and total
usage duration. Overall, the analysis reveals that a small number of users are responsible for a
disproportionate share of the most affective cues.
