ChatGPT Sensemaking and Appropriation in Everyday Life

ChatGPT has been adopted at an unprecedented pace, yet the processes through which people explore, adapt, and integrate it into everyday lives remain underexplored. We analyzed 300 Reddit comments and conducted 20 interviews, synthesizing insights from both collective sensemaking and individual trajectories. We conceptualize appropriation as developing through inventing new uses, refining skills and negotiating boundaries with personal values, and evolving role perceptions, in which ChatGPT is understood along a spectrum from productivity tool to personal connection. At the community level, Reddit supports this process by serving as a collective laboratory for experimentation and co-creation, a site of peer troubleshooting and ethical negotiation, and a space of resonance where users connect with like-minded peers, especially those who use ChatGPT for emotional support. Drawing on these findings, we propose design implications, including leveraging community creativity as a design resource and embedding designer reflexivity to foster more responsible AI development.