OpenAI boss Sam Altman has pulled back the curtain on something many people already suspected: different age groups are using ChatGPT in completely different ways, and some of those ways are raising eyebrows.
Speaking at Sequoia Capital’s AI Ascent event last May, Altman put it bluntly.
“Gross oversimplification, but like older people use ChatGPT as a Google replacement. Maybe people in their 20s and 30s use it as like a life advisor, and then, like people in college use it as an operating system,” he said.
Gen Z Is in a League of Its Own
The operating system comparison is worth unpacking. Altman was not just talking about younger users being more tech-savvy. He was describing something more involved than that. College-aged users have built out genuinely complex setups, linking ChatGPT to their files, saving elaborate prompts and essentially running parts of their lives through it.
“I mean, that stuff, I think, is all cool and impressive,” Altman said. But then he added something that caught people’s attention. “And there’s this other thing where, like, they don’t really make life decisions without asking ChatGPT what they should do.”
A big part of why younger users lean on it so heavily is the memory feature. ChatGPT can retain context from past conversations, meaning over time it builds up a detailed picture of a user’s life. “It has the full context on every person in their life and what they’ve talked about,” Altman said.
A 2025 OpenAI report confirmed the generational gap, finding that more than one-third of 18-to-24 year olds in the US use ChatGPT, more than any other demographic.
What People Are Actually Using It For
The range of things people bring to ChatGPT has grown well beyond productivity tasks. Relationship problems, medical questions, business decisions and even mental health support are all on the table. Some people have started using it as a straight-up substitute for talk therapy.
So Is It Actually Safe?
That is where things get complicated. Experts are not all singing from the same hymn sheet on this one.
A peer-reviewed study from November 2023 flagged real concerns, saying there was a clear “need for caution when using ChatGPT for safety-related information” and calling for proper safeguards so users genuinely understand what they are dealing with. A separate study went further, describing large language models like ChatGPT as “inherently sociopathic,” which raises serious questions about trusting one with anything that really matters.
On the flip side, other research has found that for everyday questions and common advice, ChatGPT is largely harmless and can actually point people in a useful direction.
The honest answer is that nobody has fully figured it out yet. And in the meantime, millions of people are already making life decisions based on what a chatbot tells them.
