Key Takeaways
- ChatGPT now exceeds 200 million weekly users, doubling in under a year.
- People use ChatGPT for information, summarizing ideas, meal planning, emotional support, and work help.
- ChatGPT is also used for RPGs, and learning subjects such as coding and languages.
As first reported by Axios, OpenAI has confirmed that ChatGPT now has more than 200 million weekly active users. That figure is twice as many as the company had back in November 2023, meaning that usage has doubled in less than a year.
You’ve probably tried ChatGPT or a similar AI chatbot, such as Google Gemini or Meta AI , and been impressed by what the current generation of generative AI chatbots is able to do, but you may not use it on a daily basis or even very often at all.
200 million people clearly do, however, to the point where they’re coming back week after week. The question is, what exactly are those 200 million people using ChatGPT for? This is an interesting question, since AI chatbots are apps that don’t have a single clear purpose. You can use them on your phone or computer to do a huge number of things, and this is partly the reason why many of us don’t use them more often: we simply don’t know what to do with them.
I’m one of the 200 million people that use ChatGPT on a regular basis, and I’ve long been interested in how other people use the app. Posts regularly pop up on the ChatGPT subreddit asking the same question, and I’ve found some very useful suggestions. To save you from the same effort, here are some of the most popular ways that people are currently using ChatGPT and similar apps.
ChatGPT
ChatGPT is one of the most popular AI chatbots in the world. It’s free to use, but a paid subscription unlocks higher usage limits and additional features.
1 ChatGPT as a replacement for Google
Get instant answers without unhelpful results
There’s no doubt that Google search has got a lot worse over the years, often serving up results for what it thinks you should have searched for rather than what you actually did. Many people are using ChatGPT as a replacement for Google . If you want a specific piece of information, a traditional search engine that provides a list of links to websites that may or may not contain the relevant information isn’t enormously useful. It’s much easier to simply ask ChatGPT which can provide you with an instant answer.
Type “what’s that Roku show starring the woman who’s in that other comedy show with Tom Hanks’ son?” into Google and you get a bunch of results about Colin Hanks who, last time I checked, was neither a show nor a woman.
Chatbots can also answer queries that search engines can’t. Type “what’s that Roku show starring the woman who’s in that other comedy show with Tom Hanks’ son?” into Google and you get a bunch of results about Colin Hanks who, last time I checked, was neither a show nor a woman. Type the same query into ChatGPT, and it responds with information about the show Slip, written by and starring Zoe Lister-Jones. It will also inform you that she appears in Life in Pieces alongside Colin Hanks, providing you with all the information you were unable to remember in one simple response. With my memory for names getting worse with every passing second, being able to get quick answers to queries like this is a lifesaver.
It shouldn’t be forgotten, however, that AI chatbots are still prone to hallucinations, so the information that you’re given may not always be completely accurate.
2 Using ChatGPT to summarize ideas
Get down all of your ideas and have ChatGPT extract the gold
A lot of people talk about using ChatGPT as a way to summarize or focus their ideas. Using the voice recognition capabilities in the ChatGPT app, it’s easy to rant away to the AI chatbot with a stream of consciousness about your ideas. You end up with a mess of a conversation that contains a lot of fluff, but potentially also the seeds of some good ideas.
Once you’ve got your ideas down, you can ask ChatGPT to summarize them, getting rid of the fluff and just leaving the good stuff.
That’s where ChatGPT really shines. Once you’ve got your ideas down, you can ask ChatGPT to summarize them, getting rid of the fluff and just leaving the good stuff. You can even have additional conversations with ChatGPT to help you to refine those ideas further, until you hit on exactly what you were trying to put your finger on in the first place.
3 Generating meal ideas based on available ingredients
You can even take a photo of the contents of your fridge
A surprisingly common thing that people use ChatGPT for is to come up with recipe ideas based on the ingredients that they have to hand. We’ve all been there; you open the fridge or hunt through the cupboards to find that you have some eggs, Greek yogurt, leftover pizza, spinach, pickles, bacon, hummus, and carrot sticks and have no idea what to make.
Give ChatGPT the ingredients you have to hand, and it will generate a recipe idea based on the food that you have available.
Give ChatGPT the ingredients, however, and it will generate a recipe idea based on the food that you have available. I entered the random list above, and it gave me a recipe for a spinach, bacon, and egg breakfast wrap which genuinely sounds delicious.
What makes this process even simpler is that you can take a photo of the food in your fridge or in your cupboard, and upload that to ChatGPT, saving you the effort of having to type out or read out all the ingredients. ChatGPT will extract the ingredients that it can see in the image and then give you a recipe based on what it’s extracted. It’s a great way to come up with recipes when you’re low on ingredients, and also means that less of your food goes to waste.
4 A source of emotional support
ChatGPT is always ready to listen
The first time I took a look on Reddit to find out how other people were using ChatGPT, there was one use that kept popping up that I was genuinely surprised by. A significant number of people said that they use ChatGPT for emotional support.
At first, this seems bizarre. How can an AI chatbot provide any meaningful emotional support? However, reading the comments, it begins to make a lot of sense. People are able to talk about what they’re thinking or feeling without embarrassment or fear of judgment. ChatGPT always has time to listen whenever you want to talk, doesn’t run out of patience, and is designed to try to avoid giving harmful advice. Using ChatGPT Voice comes close to feeling like you’re talking to a real human, and this should only improve with the new advanced voice capabilities that are currently being tested by some users.
People are able to talk about what they’re thinking or feeling without embarrassment or fear of judgment.
Many people also use ChatGPT as a talking journal. They talk about what they’ve done, their thoughts and feelings, and it’s all transcribed within the app. They can then save those conversations in whatever form they wish. Interacting with ChatGPT helps to give them further ideas about what to say, rather than sitting in front of an empty journal with no idea about what to write.
It’s important to remember that using ChatGPT for health advice, whether for your physical or mental health, isn’t advisable, as the information you’re given can be incorrect or unhelpful. If you are having physical or mental health issues, you should speak to a professional.
5 Using ChatGPT to help with work
ChatGPT can help with coding, Excel, and more
Some of the most common responses I’ve found when reading posts about how people use ChatGPT relate to coding . People who work writing code frequently use ChatGPT to help them to write their code, or to help them to fix the code they’ve written. As with anything that ChatGPT generates, the results aren’t always perfect, but they’re good enough that a lot of people are using ChatGPT regularly when working with code.
Coding isn’t the only way that ChatGPT can help with work, however. People are using it to help with writing work emails, or to summarize information pulled from work emails that they’ve received.
Coding isn’t the only way that ChatGPT can help with work, however. People are using it to help with writing work emails, or to summarize information pulled from work emails that they’ve received. It’s also an excellent way to create Excel formulas and macros that otherwise may take you hours to get working properly by yourself.
At a more general level, many people use ChatGPT to help them generate ideas for work, from creative names for new products to ideas for social media marketing content.
6 Playing role-playing games with an AI dungeon master
ChatGPT can be a source of entertainment, too
Another common use of ChatGPT among Redditors is for role-playing games . There are two main camps here. There are those that use ChatGPT to play their own single player RPGs within the app, and there are those that use ChatGPT as a tool to help them craft role-playing games they can play in person with friends. The vast majority are in the former camp.
It’s effective enough that a significant number of people are using ChatGPT to create their own personal original RPG adventures.
ChatGPT isn’t perfect for this. Many people complain about it being too easy to get out of any situation you’re in just by saying “OK, now I have a massive gun”, which ChatGPT then happily allows you to have. Others have pointed out that it’s hard to stop ChatGPT from suggesting what you might do next.
Probably the biggest issue is the limited memory, however. The conversations soon get fairly long and ChatGPT can begin to forget important information from earlier in the conversation unless constantly reminded of it. Still, it’s effective enough that a significant number of people are using ChatGPT to create their own personal original RPG adventures.
You can learn a lot from ChatGPT
Another very popular use of ChatGPT is as a tool for learning. Having ChatGPT is like having your own personalized tutor in your pocket, except it’s one that you can ask about any subject you want. People use it to explain difficult concepts in simple language, or to identify gaps in their knowledge and suggest resources to help fill those gaps.
A lot of people are using ChatGPT to help them learn a specific subject, with coding being one of the most popular. There are plenty of sites that can help you learn to code, and ChatGPT can help you work through mistakes or explain concepts you don’t fully understand.
I can now chat with ChatGPT in Italian and get my responses back in the same language. If I ever make a mistake, ChatGPT will inform me of my error and explain what the correct Italian should have been, without being judgmental.
Another popular use is for language learning. I use it this way myself; after entering a very simple prompt explaining what I wanted to do, I can now chat with ChatGPT in Italian and get my responses back in the same language. If I ever make a mistake, ChatGPT will inform me of my error and explain what the correct Italian should have been, without being judgmental. I’ve always found speaking the hardest part of learning any new language, and ChatGPT allows you to practice without the embarrassment of looking like an idiot in front of a real native speaker.
Learning with ChatGPT isn’t perfect. Since an LLM needs to be trained on real data, if you’re asking about subjects that are well-researched or well-known, then the answers are likely to be fairly accurate, since ChatGPT will have been trained on a lot of data relating to that subject. If you’re trying to learn something more advanced, or more esoteric, then it has less training data to work from, and you’re more likely to get some responses that may not be wholly accurate.
