ChatGPT: Everyone’s minion... and boss?

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ChatGPT: Everyone’s minion... and boss?

https://www.straitstimes.com/life/chatgpt-everyones-minion-and-boss

2025-12-27

Carmen Sim

The Straits Times 

SINGAPORE – Generative AI has become a verb. Go to a friend with a question, and they might shunt you with a “just ChatGPT it” or “Ask Chat”.

Verbing is that rare peak of success achieved by all endemic technology – like Google, Facebook and Grab – though none in the history of the internet have been so intensely personified by their users as OpenAI’s chatbot.

See: Chat, am I cooked? That’s Gen Z’s way of expressing doubt. It is also possible to review the machine as a writer or, more pointedly, a suspected ghostwriter of all e-mails, text messages longer than three lines and every wonky essay citation.

Our over-familiarity with Chat is a function of heavy use.

According to a Financial Times (FT) report, more than 18 billion messages are sent to ChatGPT every week.

In just three years since its launch, the service has been used by more than one in 10 people, a rate of adoption that outstrips that of the first decade of the internet, it added.

Other findings from the report based on data released by OpenAI showed that the software was primarily being used to support decision-making, with practical guidance – “how to” tutorials and creative ideation – accounting for the largest share of prompts.

Non-work-related messages had grown to more than 70 per cent of all usage, and information-seeking was the fastest-growing category in the last 12 months.

ChatGPT is now regularly being used to look for recipes, products, people and current events, in a direct threat to traditional search engines, reported FT.

Local headlines in 2025 captured how the bot is being consulted by teachers on lesson planning, newly-weds on interior design and lonely young people for life advice.

But as large language models become everyone’s boundlessly obliging co-pilot, it is not clear if the prevailing mood is one of confidence or anxiety.

Suicides in the US in 2025 were blamed on artificial intelligence (AI), after the deaths of Americans Zane Shamblin, 23, and Adam Raine, 16. Both left behind extensive chat logs with ChatGPT that revealed the software’s dangerous “mental health advice”.

Then, there was the meltdown over AI turning brains to muck after preliminary findings from a Massachusetts Institute of Technology study in June concluded that people using tools like ChatGPT became lazier with each use.

There is also the irony of local Gen Z using AI more frequently but feeling threatened by the technology in their jobs.

Close to half (49 per cent) of Gen Z respondents here believe AI will have a considerable impact on their jobs in the next five years – although only a small proportion (4 per cent) of them said they expect to lose their jobs to AI, according to a survey of more than 2,500 Singapore residents by recruitment agency Randstad in June.

Even so, there are bright spots. A 25-year-old generative AI engineer and graduate of the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) Akshaya Rajesh has rolled out the Feynman bot, named after American physicist Richard Feynman.

Unlike most popular AI chatbots used by students to get instant answers, the Feynman bot flips the script by asking the questions and expecting answers instead.

Anecdotally, the bot’s serviceable coding skills are being put to use by laymen gleefully creating their own websites as a kind of creative outlet.

These are reminders that AI is still a tool capable of good. How these outcomes balance out against potential harms is worth watching in the years to come.

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Carmen Sin is a journalist at The Straits Times, covering fashion, beauty and culture.