This is a fascinating "dataset" of the unedited human psyche.
For the first time, we have a public, raw, unfiltered log of what people actually think about and worry about—not the curated, performative versions they post on social media.
The article's list (from "hair removal" to "paracetamol overdose" to "analyze my boyfriend") says it all. It's a mirror of our mundane anxieties, our deep fears, and our loneliness, all in one place.
This is less a story about AI and more a story about us.
> Methodology: The Post downloaded 93,268 conversations from the Internet Archive using a list compiled by online research expert Henk Van Ess. The analysis focused on the 47,000 chat sessions since June 2024 in which English was the primary language, as determined using langdetect.
> A random sample of 500 conversations in The Post’s corpus was classified by topic using human review, with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.36 percent. A sample of 2,000 conversations, including the initial 500, was classified with AI using methodologies described by OpenAI in its Affective Use and How People Use ChatGPT reports, using gpt-4o and gpt-5, respectively.
If they were on the archive they must have been shared publicly by the user right?
This is a fascinating "dataset" of the unedited human psyche.
For the first time, we have a public, raw, unfiltered log of what people actually think about and worry about—not the curated, performative versions they post on social media.
The article's list (from "hair removal" to "paracetamol overdose" to "analyze my boyfriend") says it all. It's a mirror of our mundane anxieties, our deep fears, and our loneliness, all in one place.
This is less a story about AI and more a story about us.
How did they get access to the conversations ?
> Methodology: The Post downloaded 93,268 conversations from the Internet Archive using a list compiled by online research expert Henk Van Ess. The analysis focused on the 47,000 chat sessions since June 2024 in which English was the primary language, as determined using langdetect.
> A random sample of 500 conversations in The Post’s corpus was classified by topic using human review, with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.36 percent. A sample of 2,000 conversations, including the initial 500, was classified with AI using methodologies described by OpenAI in its Affective Use and How People Use ChatGPT reports, using gpt-4o and gpt-5, respectively.
If they were on the archive they must have been shared publicly by the user right?
Related:
Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45900370
Judge Orders OpenAI to Give Lawyers 20M Private Chats – 'Anonymization'
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45919357