How Are Emerging Adults Using ChatGPT in the Wild?

Abstract

General-Purpose Conversational Agents (GPCAs) such as ChatGPT have rapidly become part of emerging adults’ everyday lives. Despite significant research attention on conversational agents for young people, we lack systematic documentation of what social support emerging adults seek from GPCAs and how these systems respond in the wild. In this study, we collected ChatGPT usage histories from 85 emerging adults (ages 18–25), comprising approximately 157,000 messages exchanged over three years across 17 countries. Through mixed-methods analysis combining reflexive thematic analysis with LLM-as-a-Judge, we identified distinct usage patterns across four developmentally sensitive domains such as Self-Sufficiency and Health & Well-Being. We further identified ChatGPT response patterns such as Competence-Thwarting Support, Emotional Co-Regulation, and Creativity Support, and synthesized these findings into a design space for developmentally supportive GPCAs.