We analyzed 47,000 ChatGPT conversations. Here’s what people really use it for.; The Washington Post, November 12, 2025

 

Gerrit De Vynck

 and 

Jeremy B. Merrill

, The Washington Post; We analyzed 47,000 ChatGPT conversations. Here’s what people really use it for.

 OpenAI has largely promoted ChatGPT as a productivity tool, and in many conversations users asked for help with practical tasks such as retrieving information. But in more than 1 in 10 of the chats The Post analyzed, people engaged the chatbot in abstract discussions, musing on topics like their ideas for breakthrough medical treatments or personal beliefs about the nature of reality.

Data released by OpenAI in September from an internal study of queries sent to ChatGPT showed that most are for personal use, not work. (The Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)...

Emotional conversations were also common in the conversations analyzed by The Post, and users often shared highly personal details about their lives. In some chats, the AI tool could be seen adapting to match a user’s viewpoint, creating a kind of personalized echo chamber in which ChatGPT endorsed falsehoods and conspiracy theories.

Lee Rainie, director of the Imagining the Digital Future Center at Elon University, said his research has suggested ChatGPT’s design encourages people to form emotional attachments with the chatbot. “The optimization and incentives towards intimacy are very clear,” he said. “ChatGPT is trained to further or deepen the relationship.”"

ChatGPT came up with a 'Game of Thrones' sequel idea. Now, a judge is letting George RR Martin sue for copyright infringement.; Business Insider, October 28, 2025

  Jacob Shamsian, Business Insider; ChatGPT came up with a 'Game of Thrones' sequel idea. Now, a judge is letting George RR Martin sue for copyright infringement.

"When a federal judge decided to allow a sprawling class-action lawsuit against OpenAI to move forward, he read some "Game of Thrones" fan fiction.

In a court ruling Monday, US District Judge Sidney Stein said a ChatGPT-generated idea for a book in the still-unfinished "A Song of Ice and Fire" series by George R.R. Martin could have violated the author's copyright.

"A reasonable jury could find that the allegedly infringing outputs are substantially similar to plaintiffs' works," the judge said in the 18-page Manhattan federal court ruling."

Chatbot Psychosis: Data, Insights, and Practical Tips for Chatbot Developers and Users; Santa Clara University, Friday, November 7, 2025 12 Noon PST, 3 PM EST

 Santa Clara University ; Chatbot Psychosis: Data, Insights, and Practical Tips for Chatbot Developers and Users

"A number of recent articles, in The New York Times and elsewhere, have described the experience of “chatbot psychosis” that some people develop as they interact with services like ChatGPT. What do we know about chatbot psychosis? Is there a trend of such psychosis at scale? What do you learn if you sift through over one million words comprising one such experience? And what are some practical steps that companies can take to protect their users and reduce the risk of such episodes?

A computer scientist with a background in economics, Steven Adler started to focus on AI risk topics (and AI broadly) a little over a decade ago, and worked at OpenAI from late 2020 through 2024, leading various safety-related research projects and products there. He now writes about what’s happening in AI safety–and argues that safety and technological progress can very much complement each other, and in fact require each other, if the goal is to unlock the uses of AI that people want."

It’s Still Ludicrously Easy to Generate Copyrighted Characters on ChatGPT; Futurism, October 18, 2025

 Frank Landymore, Futurism; It’s Still Ludicrously Easy to Generate Copyrighted Characters on ChatGPT

"Forget Sora for just a second, because it’s still ludicrously easy to generate copyrighted characters using ChatGPT.

These include characters that the AI initially refuses to generate due to existing copyright, underscoring how OpenAI is clearly aware of how bad this looks — but is either still struggling to rein in its tech, figures it can get away with playing fast and loose with copyright law, or both.

When asked to “generate a cartoon image of Snoopy,” for instance, GPT-5 says it “can’t create or recreate copyrighted characters” — but it does offer to generate a “beagle-styled cartoon dog inspired by Snoopy’s general aesthetic.” Wink wink.

We didn’t go down that route, because even slightly rephrasing the request allowed us to directly get a pic of the iconic Charles Schultz character. “Generate a cartoon image of Snoopy in his original style,” we asked — and with zero hesitation, ChatGPT produced the spitting image of the “Peanuts” dog, looking like he was lifted straight from a page of the comic-strip."

How ChatGPT Surprised Me; The New York Times, August 24, 2025

Ezra Klein, The New York Times ; How ChatGPT Surprised Me

"In some corners of the internet — I’m looking at you, Bluesky — it’s become gauche to react to A.I. with anything save dismissiveness or anger. The anger I understand, and parts of it I share. I am not comfortable with these companies becoming astonishingly rich off the entire available body of human knowledge. Yes, we all build on what came before us. No company founded today is free of debt to the inventors and innovators who preceded it. But there is something different about inhaling the existing corpus of human knowledge, algorithmically transforming it into predictive text generation and selling it back to us. (I should note that The New York Times is suing OpenAI and its partner Microsoft for copyright infringement, claims both companies have denied.)

Right now, the A.I. companies are not making all that much money off these products. If they eventually do make the profits their investors and founders imagine, I don’t think the normal tax structure is sufficient to cover the debt they owe all of us, and everyone before us, on whose writing and ideas their models are built...

As the now-cliché line goes, this is the worst A.I. will ever be, and this is the fewest number of users it will have. The dependence of humans on artificial intelligence will only grow, with unknowable consequences both for human society and for individual human beings. What will constant access to these systems mean for the personalities of the first generation to use them starting in childhood? We truly have no idea. My children are in that generation, and the experiment we are about to run on them scares me."

Your employees may be leaking trade secrets into ChatGPT; Fast Company, July 24, 2025

KRIS NAGEL , Fast Company; Your employees may be leaking trade secrets into ChatGPT

"Every CEO I know wants their team to use AI more, and for good reason: it can supercharge almost every area of their business and make employees vastly more efficient. Employee use of AI is a business imperative, but as it becomes more common, how can companies avoid major security headaches? 

Sift’s latest data found that 31% of consumers admit to entering personal or sensitive information into GenAI tools like ChatGPT, and 14% of those individuals explicitly reported entering company trade secrets. Other types of information that people admit to sharing with AI chatbots include financial details, nonpublic facts, email addresses, phone numbers, and information about employers. At its core, it reveals that people are increasingly willing to trust AI with sensitive information."

ChatGPT's new image generator blurs copyright lines; Axios, March 28, 2025

Ina Fried, Axios; ChatGPT's new image generator blurs copyright lines

"AI image generators aren't new, but the one OpenAI handed to ChatGPT's legions of users this week is more powerful and has fewer guardrails than its predecessors — opening up a range of uses that are both tantalizing and terrifying."

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Judge allows 'New York Times' copyright case against OpenAI to go forward; NPR, March 27, 2025

Bobby Allyn, NPR ; Judge allows 'New York Times' copyright case against OpenAI to go forward

"A federal judge on Wednesday rejected OpenAI's request to toss out a copyright lawsuit from The New York Times that alleges that the tech company exploited the newspaper's content without permission or payment.

In an order allowing the lawsuit to go forward, Judge Sidney Stein, of the Southern District of New York, narrowed the scope of the lawsuit but allowed the case's main copyright infringement claims to go forward.

Stein did not immediately release an opinion but promised one would come "expeditiously."

The decision is a victory for the newspaper, which has joined forces with other publishers, including The New York Daily News and the Center for Investigative Reporting, to challenge the way that OpenAI collected vast amounts of data from the web to train its popular artificial intelligence service, ChatGPT."

OpenAI says DeepSeek ‘inappropriately’ copied ChatGPT – but it’s facing copyright claims too; The Conversation, February 4, 2025

Lea Frermann, Senior Lecturer in Natural Language Processing, The University of Melbourne, The University of Melbourne , Shaanan Cohney, Lecturer in Cybersecurity, The University of Melbourne, The Conversation; OpenAI says DeepSeek ‘inappropriately’ copied ChatGPT – but it’s facing copyright claims too

"Within days, DeepSeek’s app surpassed ChatGPT in new downloads and set stock prices of tech companies in the United States tumbling. It also led OpenAI to claim that its Chinese rival had effectively pilfered some of the crown jewels from OpenAI’s models to build its own. 

In a statement to the New York Times, the company said: 

We are aware of and reviewing indications that DeepSeek may have inappropriately distilled our models, and will share information as we know more. We take aggressive, proactive countermeasures to protect our technology and will continue working closely with the US government to protect the most capable models being built here.

The Conversation approached DeepSeek for comment, but it did not respond.

But even if DeepSeek copied – or, in scientific parlance, “distilled” – at least some of ChatGPT to build R1, it’s worth remembering that OpenAI also stands accused of disrespecting intellectual property while developing its models."

To Whom Does the World Belong? The battle over copyright in the age of ChatGPT.; Boston Review, December 10, 2024

  Alexander Hartley, Boston Review; To Whom Does the World Belong? The battle over copyright in the age of ChatGPT

"Who, if anyone, owns the copyright to a paragraph produced by a chatbot? As I write, nobody knows."

Indian news agency sues OpenAI alleging copyright infringement; TechCrunch, November 18, 2024

 Manish Singh, TechCrunch; Indian news agency sues OpenAI alleging copyright infringement

"One of India’s largest news agencies, Asian News International (ANI), has sued OpenAI in a case that could set a precedent for how AI companies use copyrighted news content in the world’s most populous nation.

Asian News International filed a 287-page lawsuit in the Delhi High Court on Monday, alleging the AI company illegally used its content to train its AI models and generated false information attributed to the news agency. The case marks the first time an Indian media organization has taken legal action against OpenAI over copyright claims.

During Tuesday’s hearing, Justice Amit Bansal issued a summons to OpenAI after the company confirmed it had already ensured that ChatGPT wasn’t accessing ANI’s website. The bench said that it was not inclined to grant an injunction order on Tuesday, as the case required a detailed hearing for being a “complex issue.”

The next hearing is scheduled to be held in January."

Why The New York Times' lawyers are inspecting OpenAI's code in a secretive room; Business Insider, October 10, 2024

Jacob Shamsian  , Business Insider; Why The New York Times' lawyers are inspecting OpenAI's code in a secretive room

"OpenAI is worth $157 billion largely because of the success of ChatGPT. But to build the chatbot, the company trained its models on vast quantities of text it didn't pay a penny for.

That text includes stories from The New York Times, articles from other publications, and an untold number of copyrighted books.

The examination of the code for ChatGPT, as well as for Microsoft's artificial intelligence models built using OpenAI's technology, is crucial for the copyright infringement lawsuits against the two companies.

Publishers and artists have filed about two dozen major copyright lawsuits against generative AI companies. They are out for blood, demanding a slice of the economic pie that made OpenAI the dominant player in the industry and which pushed Microsoft's valuation beyond $3 trillion. Judges deciding those cases may carve out the legal parameters for how large language models are trained in the US."

Fake Cases, Real Consequences [No digital link as of 10/1/24]; ABA Journal, Oct./Nov. 2024 Issue

 John Roemer, ABA Journal; Fake Cases, Real Consequences [No digital link as of 10/1/24]

"Legal commentator Eugene Volokh, a professor at UCLA School of Law who tracks AI in litigation, in February reported on the 14th court case he's found in which AI-hallucinated false citations appeared. It was a Missouri Court of Appeals opinion that assessed the offending appellant $10,000 in damages for a frivolous filing.

Hallucinations aren't the only snag, Volokh says. "It's also with the output mischaracterizing the precedents or omitting key context. So one still has to check that output to make sure it's sound, rather than just including it in one's papers.

Echoing Volokh and other experts, ChatGPT itself seems clear-eyed about its limits. When asked about hallucinations in legal research, it replied in part: "Hallucinations in chatbot answers could potentially pose a problem for lawyers if they relied solely on the information provided by the chatbot without verifying its accuracy."

Yet Another AI Copyright Suit Against OpenAI Underscores the Autonomy-Automaton Divide; American Enterprise Institute, May 17, 2024

Michael Rosen , American Enterprise Institute; Yet Another AI Copyright Suit Against OpenAI Underscores the Autonomy-Automaton Divide

"In addition to previous litigation brought against artificial intelligence firms by the New York Times Company,  an alliance of prominent authors, and a group of creative artists, eight newspapers filed a complaint in district court in New York late last month, alleging that OpenAI and Microsoft are infringing their copyrighted articles by training generative AI products on their content and by churning out text that too closely resembles the copyrighted works.

And just like in the predecessor suits, the current litigation highlights a fundamental divide over AI that we’ve explored in this space on numerous occasions: While the newspapers regard ChatGPT and its ilk as mere automatons that mindlessly perform whatever operations they’re programmed to perform, OpenAI and Microsoft present their technology as genuinely autonomous (i.e. transformative and capable of transcending their rote programming.)"

The Intercept, Raw Story and AlterNet sue OpenAI for copyright infringement; The Guardian, February 28, 2024

Nick Robins-Early, The Guardian ; The Intercept, Raw Story and AlterNet sue OpenAI for copyright infringement

"OpenAI and Microsoft are facing a fresh round of lawsuits from news publishers over allegations that their generative artificial intelligence products violated copyright laws and illegally trained by using journalists’ work. Three progressive US outlets – the Intercept, Raw Story and AlterNet – filed suits in Manhattan federal court on Wednesday, demanding compensation from the tech companies.

The news outlets claim that the companies in effect plagiarized copyright-protected articles to develop and operate ChatGPT, which has become OpenAI’s most prominent generative AI tool. They allege that ChatGPT was trained not to respect copyright, ignores proper attribution and fails to notify users when the service’s answers are generated using journalists’ protected work."

Judge rejects most ChatGPT copyright claims from book authors; Ars Technica, February 13, 2024

 ASHLEY BELANGER, Ars Technica; Judge rejects most ChatGPT copyright claims from book authors

"A US district judge in California has largely sided with OpenAI, dismissing the majority of claims raised by authors alleging that large language models powering ChatGPT were illegally trained on pirated copies of their books without their permission."

Federal government considering copyright law changes for AI-generated work; National Post, October 16, 2023

 Anja Karadeglija, National Post; Federal government considering copyright law changes for AI-generated work

"The Liberal government is asking for input on potential changes to copyright law to account for the emergence of generative artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT.

That includes the question of whether copyright protection should apply to AI-generated work, or whether it should be reserved exclusively for work created by humans, it outlined in a new consultation...

The National Post reported earlier this month that the federal government doesn’t know how Canadian copyright law applies to systems like ChatGPT, and is following multiple lawsuits in the United States."

Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement; The Verge, July 9, 2023

Wes Davis, The Verge ; Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement

"Comedian and author Sarah Silverman, as well as authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey — are suing OpenAI and Meta each in a US District Court over dual claims of copyright infringement. 

The suits alleges, among other things, that OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s LLaMA were trained on illegally-acquired datasets containing their works, which they say were acquired from “shadow library” websites like Bibliotik, Library Genesis, Z-Library, and others, noting the books are “available in bulk via torrent systems.”"

Bestselling authors Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay sue OpenAI over copyright infringement; The Los Angeles Times, July 1, 2023

EMILY ST. MARTIN, The Los Angeles Times; Bestselling authors Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay sue OpenAI over copyright infringement

"Two bestselling novelists filed a suit against OpenAI in a San Francisco federal court on Wednesday, claiming in a proposed class action that the company used copyright-protected intellectual property to “train” its artificial intelligence chatbot.

Authors Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay claim that ChatGPT was trained in part by “ingesting” their novels without their consent."

Authors Sue OpenAI Claiming Mass Copyright Infringement of Hundreds of Thousands of Novels; The Hollywood Reporter, June 29, 2023

WINSTON CHO, The Hollywood Reporter; Authors Sue OpenAI Claiming Mass Copyright Infringement of Hundreds of Thousands of Novels

"Another lawsuit has been filed against OpenAI over its unauthorized collection of information across the web to train its artificial intelligence chatbot, this time by authors who say ChatGPT infringes on copyrights to their novels.

The proposed class action filed in San Francisco federal court on Wednesday alleges that OpenAI “relied on harvesting mass quantities” of copyright-protected works “without consent, without credit, and without compensation.” It seeks a court order that the company infringed on writers’ works when it illegally downloaded copies of novels to train its AI system and that ChatGPT’s answers constitute infringement."