What is it about?
People do not simply adopt ChatGPT -- they gradually make it their own. This paper explores how users discover new uses, develop skills, set personal boundaries, and change how they think about ChatGPT over time. By combining interviews with Reddit discussions, we show how online communities help people experiment, troubleshoot problems, debate appropriate uses, and make sense of ChatGPT’s role in everyday life.
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Why is it important?
As ChatGPT becomes part of everyday life, it is important to understand not just what people use it for, but how they learn to live with it. Our findings highlight the important role of online communities in shaping how people discover uses, overcome problems, negotiate boundaries, and understand their relationship with AI. Recognizing these social processes can help designers build more responsible and user-centered AI systems.
Perspectives
This study began in the early days of ChatGPT, when generative AI suddenly became accessible to everyday users. I was curious about what people would actually do with such an open-ended technology: how they would discover uses for it, decide where their boundaries were, and change their practices over time. I also wanted to understand how these individual experiences develop alongside emerging social norms and community discussions. These questions feel even more important now, as AI becomes part of more areas of everyday life. How do we design and safeguard technologies when we cannot fully anticipate how people will use them? I hope you find this work thought-provoking, and that it encourages you to reflect on your own relationship with AI, the norms we are collectively creating around it, and where these increasingly open-ended technologies may lead us.
Rongjun Ma
Universitat Politecnica de Valencia
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: ChatGPT Sensemaking and Appropriation in Everyday Life, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, September 2026, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3816911.
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