ChatGPT: Why do most of your users ask for help writing – prose, not code?

Study that used actual input to OpenAI’s chatbot finds personal use surging

Users of individual accounts for OpenAI’s ChatGPT mostly use it for research and to help with writing, according to a new study into the kind of queries fed into the service.

The study [PDF], penned by researchers from OpenAI and the USA’s National Bureau of Labor Research, used a random selection of messages sent to ChatGPT by users signed up for Free, Plus, and Pro plans between May 2024 and June 2025. Those are plans OpenAI aims at individuals, not businesses. That may help to explain why the study found steady growth in work-related messages but even faster growth in messages of a personal nature, which have grown from 53 percent to more than 70 percent of all usage.

If you’ve used ChatGPT during the study period and fear the authors read your input, the paper explains that the researchers devised a method that meant no human read your work. They also excluded material from users who opted out or deleted their accounts, or were under 18 at the time they used the bot.

The study found most queries to ChatGPT concern either “Practical Guidance”, “Seeking Information”, or “Writing”.

An example the paper offers for “Seeking Information” is asking ChatGPT to find the qualifying times by age and gender for the Boston Marathon, while “Practical Guidance” involves asking ChatGPT to devise a fitness program that will help a user prepare to run in the event.

“Writing” covers requests for “automated production of emails, documents and other communications, but also editing, critiquing, summarizing, and translating text provided by the user.” The study finds writing accounts for 40 percent of ChatGPT usage at work, and that almost two thirds of such requests ask ChatGPT to edit, critique, or translate text rather than create it from scratch.

Most of you still appear to write your own material. As we always do here at The Register.

The authors also considered the outcome users wanted to achieve when using ChatGPT, and categorized those in three ways:

• Asking for information or clarification to inform a decision
• Doing – a request for ChatGPT to produce some output or perform a particular task
• Expressing sharing a view or feeling without seeking any information or action

The study found about 49 percent of messages analyzed involved Asking, 40 percent were Doing tasks, and the remainder involved Expressing.

Those numbers shift in messages related to work, 56 percent of which involve Doing – and nearly three-quarters of those are Writing tasks.

The authors found the prevalence of writing tasks notable for two reasons.

“First, writing is a task that is common to nearly all white-collar jobs, and good written communication skills are among the top ‘soft’ skills demanded by employers,” they wrote. “Second, one distinctive feature of generative AI, relative to other information technologies, is its ability to produce long-form outputs such as writing and software code.”

Yet just 4.2 percent of input considered in this study concerned computer programming, a rate the authors compared to another study that found a third of work-related requests sent to Anthropic’s Claude chatbot involve coding.

The researchers then mapped the content of messages sent to ChatGPT against the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) survey of job characteristics supported by the U.S. Department of Labor.

“We find that about 81 percent of work-related messages are associated with two broad work activities: 1) obtaining, documenting, and interpreting information; and 2) making decisions, giving advice, solving problems, and thinking creatively,” they wrote, adding that this pattern is very similar across different occupations.

“Overall, we find that information-seeking and decision support are the most common ChatGPT use cases in most jobs,” the paper states. “This is consistent with the fact that almost half of all ChatGPT usage is either Practical Guidance or Seeking Information.”

Other findings include:

• A big shift in the gender of users. In the months after ChatGPT’s debut, 80 percent of active users’ names were masculine. That number fell to 48 percent as of June 2025;
• More than half of all messages sent by adults came from users aged under 26;
• Educated users and users in highly paid professional occupations are substantially more likely to use ChatGPT for work.

The paper concludes “users currently appear to derive value from using ChatGPT as an advisor or research assistant, not just a technology that performs job tasks directly” and that the bot “likely improves worker output by providing decision support, which is especially important in knowledge-intensive jobs where productivity is increasing in the quality of decision-making.”

That's a welcome finding for OpenAI given the company hopes to do things like spend $300 billion on Oracle Cloud. ®