The whole world is adopting: Overall global use of ChatGPT has, no surprise, exploded from the thousands at its Nov. 2022 launch to more than 770 million active weekly users as of Sept. 2025. That’s nearly 10% of the entire population of Earth. Those users sent more than 2.5 billion ChatGPT messages per day. In economic terms: Holy. Shit.

Chatbots are becoming more personal, less professional: As more and more people use ChatGPT, the percentage of work-related queries has gradually shifted downward. The chatbot’s early adopters tended to use it as a workplace tool like Excel or Slack. In the past twelve months, though, ChatGPT use has insinuated itself into the personal lives of its users.

It’s not just a writing tool anymore: Eighteen months ago, more than one-third of all prompts asked ChatGPT for help with writing. That’s decreased to under one-quarter.

People aren’t necessarily using the chatbot any less for writing help today. It’s more likely that we’ve become more comfortable using it in other ways as well: to seek information (using ChatGPT instead of Google) and ask for practical guidance (“Does ice reduce pimples?” or “How do you calculate the area of a circle?”).

The shark-fin multimedia bump in the chart below is accounted for by OpenAI’s release of its GPT-4o image generator in March 2025, which enabled users to generate images in the iconic Studio Ghibli style. (Still no lawsuit from the Japanese animation studio on that, BTW.)

Gender equality has arrived: Early adopters of ChatGPT—those who picked it up in late 2022 and through 2023—tended to skew 82.4% male. But the gap closed rapidly as more women adopted the technology. Fifty-fifty gender equality was reached by about May 2025.

The estimation in the chart below is imperfect, as the researchers based this data on lists of “typically masculine” and “typically feminine” first names of users, with names of ambiguous gender excluded. But it’s interesting even given its limitations.

Age equality has not: As of July 2025, nearly half of all prompts were sent by adults in the age 18-26 cohort. The researchers did not include any data for minors under the age of 18.

If there’s one annoying deficiency in the study, it’s the lack of weekly active users segmented into age categories. The chart below tracks the likelihood that a prompt is work-related, broken out by age cohort, but it’s not the same as just simple usage-by-age.

The world-related chart is kind of interesting, if not that surprising: Older people (age 26-55) use ChatGPT for work more than younger people (age 18-25), who use it much more for personal interests. The age 66+ data line is kind of wild, though. I don’t know how to account for it, and neither do the authors.

The 100 Best Artworks of the 21st Century, by the editors of ArtNEWS/Art in America. Amazing list that will crack your skull open with wild creativity, new perspectives, shock and spark.

The Motel Life, by Willy Vlautin. Great gritty-realist fiction about two young scufflers in Reno. Terrific book.

Palantir’s tools pose an invisible danger, by Juan Sebastián Pinto in The Guardian. ISTAR systems are the AI-driven systems that power ICE dragnets and drone warfare attacks. Some real dystopian shit brought to you by the good folks at Palantir. Pinto, who used to work for Palantir, is a writer/designer/critic worth watching. He’s based in Denver which makes me like him even more.