The Social Life of ChatGPT: Insights From TikTok

Abstract

ChatGPT is reshaping ideas of agency, companionship, and emotional intelligence in a post digital world. Research has often focused on ChatGPT’s implications in industry settings, such as education, but less attention has been given to how humans personally engage emotionally with digital AI tools. TikTok, shaped by algorithmic visibility and creative user content, offers a unique space to examine these interactions, particularly among younger generations. As ChatGPT’s popularity grows, TikTok has become a site where discourse around generative AI’s adoption and usage unfolds and can be situated as a rich context for analyzing its role in everyday life. This work-in-progress adopts a posthumanist lens to examine how TikTok users construct narratives around ChatGPT's social roles, exploring the platform as a system where norms are renegotiated, and social narratives are co-constructed. The findings reveal that ChatGPT is frequently positioned as a friend, attributed to perceived affordances such as its perceived neutrality, limited need for socioemotional reciprocity, and constant availability. These affordances can lead to emotional dependency and overreliance, as users view these AI features as more advantageous for social and emotional connections than human interactions. The preliminary findings underscore ChatGPT’s emerging role as a relational entity in human-AI interactions. This paper contributes to ongoing discussions about the implications of AI integration as an agent in society and highlights broader shifts in societal norms, and provides insights into how TikTok, as a networked platform, plays a role in these shifts.

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