Shh, ChatGPT. That’s a Secret.

This past spring, a man in Washington State worried that his marriage was on the verge of collapse. “I am depressed and going a little crazy, still love her and want to win her back,” he typed into ChatGPT. With the chatbot’s help, he wanted to write a letter protesting her decision to file for divorce and post it to their bedroom door. “Emphasize my deep guilt, shame, and remorse for not nurturing and being a better husband, father, and provider,” he wrote. In another message, he asked ChatGPT to write his wife a poem “so epic that it could make her change her mind but not cheesy or over the top.”

The man’s chat history was included in the WildChat data set, a collection of 1 million ChatGPT conversations gathered consensually by researchers to document how people are interacting with the popular chatbot. Some conversations are filled with requests for marketing copy and homework help. Others might make you feel as if you’re gazing into the living rooms of unwitting strangers. Here, the most intimate details of people’s lives are on full display: A school case manager reveals details of specific students’ learning disabilities, a minor frets over possible legal charges, a girl laments the sound of her own laugh.

People share personal information about themselves all the time online, whether in Google searches (“best couples therapists”) or Amazon orders (“pregnancy test”). But chatbots are uniquely good at getting us to reveal details about ourselves. Common usages, such as asking for personal advice and résumé help, can expose more about a user “than they ever would have to any individual website previously,” Peter Henderson, a computer scientist at Princeton, told me in an email. For AI companies, your secrets might turn out to be a gold mine.

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