{"id":15959,"date":"2026-08-18T12:01:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-18T12:01:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.theck1.no\/?p=15959"},"modified":"2026-08-18T12:01:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T12:01:09","slug":"we-still-dont-know-how-people-are-really-using-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.theck1.no\/?p=15959","title":{"rendered":"We still don\u2019t know how people are really using AI"},"content":{"rendered":"
\nEileen Guo<\/strong>
\n •
\nAugust 18, 2026\n<\/div>\n\n
<\/div>\n

AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI regularly publish reports on how people are using products like Claude and ChatGPT, but they only release the data they want us to see, AI researchers say. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no independent source to corroborate it,\u201d says Anka Reuel, a Computer Science PhD candidate at the Stanford Trustworthy AI Research (STAIR) Lab. <\/p>\n

Reuel is co-lead of a new research project, called the AI Observatory, that aims to fill in the gap. It\u2019s a public platform that aggregated and analyzed real AI conversations with popular models like Claude and Gemini that were collected with users\u2019 consent through seven existing datasets. The Observatory’s intent is to provide independent sources of information for researchers and policymakers to assess how people are using generative AI. Stakeholders are currently making highly consequential decisions about AI\u2019s benefits and risks based on very limited data, says Reuel. <\/p>\n

The AI Observatory found that AI use differs significantly across models, and has changed over time. Its research shows many more sensitive behaviors than are captured in reports from major AI companies, which they say focus more on work than on personal use. <\/p>\n

Anthropic Economic Index is one of the best known and most widely cited sources of AI usage data but it has blind spots. As its name suggests, it focuses on work- and productivity-related uses of Claude AI\u2014filtering out conversations that are unrelated to these uses. <\/p>\n

When the AI Observatory team applied Anthropic\u2019s methods to their dataset, they found that nearly half of the conversations\u2014or 48%\u2014 would have been filtered out. Those non-work-related conversations that were filtered out were more likely to include health and relationships (44.2% versus 31.2% in Anthropic\u2019s analysis), adult or illicit topics (7.9% versus 2.1%), harassment and hate (27.5% versus 5.66%), and sexual content (16.7% versus 2.4%). (OpenAI\u2019s 2025 report on ChatGPT use, similarly, found<\/a> that only 30% of consumer use was related to work.)<\/p>\n

Anthropic has released separate blog posts on how people use Claude for support or companionship<\/a>,<\/strong> and even to generate CSAM<\/a>, \u201cbut having [the AI Observatory\u2019s] bird eye view analysis rather than sectioned off into a separate report helps\u201d researchers understand the different uses more consistently, says David Widder, an assistant professor at UT-Austin\u2019s School of Information, who researches how people interact with AI systems and is not involved with the AI Observatory. <\/p>\n

The datasets the AI Observatory looked at include conversations that took place between 2023 and 2025, and it found differences both in how people were using AI and how various AI platforms responded. <\/p>\n

Conversations within WildChat, one of the largest and most detailed datasets included in the AI Observatory\u2019s study, got longer and more elaborate over time, indicated by increases in prompt tokens, response tokens, and conversation turns. <\/p>\n

There was also significantly more small talk over time. That suggests that AI companionship was increasing; meanwhile the AI assistants\u2019 self-disclosure (i.e. that it was a chatbot) decreased. <\/p>\n

Additionally, exchanges that the researchers labeled as sensitive use\u2014meaning ones with potentially harmful or restricted content, including sexual harassment and hate speech\u2014dropped. That might suggest that platforms were generally deploying more effective safeguards. <\/p>\n

The AI Observatory also found that AI use looked significantly different depending on the model. Depending on the tool, users ranged in topics, interaction styles, conversation structures, as well as both the likelihood and type of sensitive use cases. <\/p>\n

For example, the researchers found that people used Grok and Gemini more frequently for information retrieval. Grok, in particular, was especially popular for information on news and politics, but it was also where misinformation tended to concentrate. (This is consistent with other research <\/a>that has also shown how readily misinformation proliferates on Grok. xAI did not respond to a request for comment.) <\/p>\n

Meanwhile, people were more likely to turn to Anthropic for coding, Gemini for social and roleplay uses, and ChatGPT for homework assistance. <\/p>\n

There were even differences among different versions of the same model. Researchers found that people had shorter conversations with ChatGPT when it was powered by GPT-3.5, and longer and more iterative ones with GPT-4o\u2014which makes sense given that that version became known for leading to emotional addiction<\/a>. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Company reports, however, didn\u2019t tend to capture these nuances across or even within their own models. \u201cNo single company report tells the whole story,\u201d says Shayne Longpre, a recent PhD graduate from the MIT Media Lab who co-led the research with Reuel. <\/p>\n

To create the AI Observatory, Reuel and researchers from MIT, Stanford, the Data Provenance Initiative<\/a>, and other institutions, aggregated 24,521 conservations across 85,633 conversational turns (that is, the user prompt and corresponding AI response) from seven real-world datasets collected by previous research. These conversations came from 5,000 users interacting with 52 different models, including ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok, between 2023 and 2025. <\/p>\n

But these conversations are a drop in the proverbial bucket compared to the data that the big labs themselves have access to. The latest Anthropic Economic AI Index<\/a>, for example, is based on analysis of 1 million Claude conversations; OpenAI\u2019s report on how people are using ChatGPT<\/a> analyzed 1.5 million conversations.  <\/p>\n

An Anthropic representative said that their published research reflects their research teams\u2019 specific questions and interests, and the importance of supporting external independent research. OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment. <\/p>\n

Additionally, the fact that the AI Observatory\u2019s dataset draws from voluntarily-provided sources means that it\u2019s likely underrepresenting sensitive uses, which people may be less likely to share. Thus, the researchers caution that its findings are not indicative of all AI use. <\/p>\n

The Observatory\u2019s work, though, broadens access for the research community. AI companies don\u2019t typically share their chat data for analysis, which means their reports tend to focus on the findings that paint their companies in the best light, independent researchers, like Reuel and Widder, say. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we want to ask, for example: is Anthropic’s general-purpose AI system\u2026used mostly for good, or mostly for bad\u2026we don’t have a way of answering that question because that information is proprietary,\u201d explains Widder, the assistant professor at UT-Austin\u2019s School of Information.<\/p>\n

The AI Observatory\u2019s data will be available to researchers for analysis, and the team hopes to expand its datasets over time. Ideally, Reuel says, the AI companies would share their data with independent researchers\u2014in ways that protect user privacy, of course. But as it currently stands  anyone making decisions based on  AI usage data risks \u201ccompletely operating in the wild and making these really consequential decisions without knowing what’s actually happening beyond those company narratives,\u201d says Reuel.  <\/p>\n

Read the full article →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eileen Guo • August 18, 2026 AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI regularly publish reports on how people are using products like Claude and ChatGPT, but they only release the data they want us to see, AI researchers say.  \u201cThere is no independent source to corroborate it,\u201d says Anka Reuel, a Computer Science PhD candidate<\/p>\n

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