ChatGPT Is Coming for Your Group Chats — but You Might Not Want It

ChatGPT just added a group chat feature, which is intriguing and slightly confusing. You add your friends to a new chat inside the app, and then as you and the real humans chat away, the AI chatbot can weigh in as needed.

Like I said, intriguing. The idea of moving your group chat with friends to something that lives inside ChatGPT is, well, somewhat headache-inducing, if only from a privacy and security standpoint. I won’t even touch on the freakiness of moving our social lives into an AI chatbot app — I’ll let you ponder the implications of that all on your own.

I can imagine there is some usefulness, though. In the demo video created by OpenAI about the feature, a group chat is shown where friends are trying to decide where to meet for dinner, and it provides several restaurant recommendations.

(Side note: “Trying to decide what restaurant to pick” is a human conundrum use case that seems like every tech company has attempted at various points to solve. There are, indeed, many potential technical solutions here, although, in my experience, the only true fix is having one extremely forceful person in the group who goes ahead and picks a place for everyone.)

Anyway, I had to test out this new group chat feature.

I tried inviting some friends to three separate group chats with ChatGPT. Now, of course, I was testing it out for the first time, so we were doing the standard “let’s play with a new AI tool” schtick. In one chat, we pretended to have an argument and tried (mostly unsuccessfully) to get ChatGPT to take sides; we accused ChatGPT of hurting our feelings. Our immediate impulse to try to torture a chatbot as a sort of game reminded me of a famous tweet about killing E.T. with hammers.

In another chat, we tried to talk normally, but ChatGPT kept butting in. One weird thing is that ChatGPT replies to nearly everything people write unless it’s explicitly addressing the other person (“Hey Peter …”).

This, as you can imagine, is pretty annoying. ChatGPT tends to be long-winded compared to a typical human. It answers in paragraphs and bullet points, with lots of throat-clearing and hedging, taking up inches and inches of screen per answer. This is fine when it’s just you and ChatGPT, but somehow reading ChatGPT’s replies to someone else is intolerable.

As for the restaurant use case, I suppose it needs a little work. I asked it for a restaurant in NYC, and it suggested Gramercy Tavern, which is very famous, expensive, and hard to get a table at. But, sure.

It was, however, helpful when I tried doing a “normal” chat with my colleagues Peter and Pranav. Pranav talked about weekend plans for a hike, and I asked ChatGPT to make him an itinerary. It gave him helpful advice (screenshot his parking pass because there was spotty cell service — good tip!).

None of these were particularly amazing or unique uses for ChatGPT, just one-on-one, and they weren’t particularly thrilling in a group chat, either.

I won’t be taking my group chats to ChatGPT

I don’t imagine I’ll switch my group chats to the ChatGPT app anytime soon. But I can see some other great potential uses for it as a multi-user version of ChatGPT. Think of a group study session, or coworkers writing code together, or preparing meeting notes, or the myriad of other things people use ChatGPT for — now just with another person able to do it, too.

I don’t think my personal group chats need an AI assistant at the moment (maybe yours do? I don’t know your weird life!), but the ability to work with another person inside the same ChatGPT chat seems productive and appealing.

Like with any new AI product, figuring out “what will people use this for?” is a bit of a guess, and there’s a huge range and lots of unexpected uses. I’m curious to see what happens here — email me to tell me if you have fun uses for this with your friends: knotopoulos@businessinsider.com. I want to hear!