ChatGPT use is picking up again, just as students head back to school
Students are returning to AI chatbots in swaths after a summer lull.
Pencil case? Check. Textbooks? Check. Large language model with multistep reasoning capabilities? Check.
With the long weekend signaling the final dregs of summer, students across the country are gearing up for the new term. And, in 2025, back to school for many high school and college students means reconnecting with their study buddy: ChatGPT.
Bot lull summer
As reported by Futurism in August, daily usage of OpenAI’s flagship chatbot plummeted in early June, when summer semesters wrapped up, according to data from AI platform OpenRouter. Based on a 2.5 million-strong user base, peak usage coincided with the middle of finals season on May 27, as users generated 97.4 billion tokens (a unit for data processing equivalent to roughly four English characters).
Soon after, average monthly usage more than halved from May to June, when summer vacation began, to 36.7 billion tokens per day, and remained low throughout July. Now, as a new school year looms, ChatGPT usage is picking back up again.
Chat, eat my homework
Per Futurism, other drops in ChatGPT usage throughout the school year coincided with weekends; a Google report on shopping trends also outlined that searches for “AI laptops” more than quadrupled from mid-April to the end of May, during exam season; and a Pew Research survey from January found that the share of teens who said they use ChatGPT for schoolwork doubled to 26% from 2023 to 2025.
Though even the most esteemed institutes for learning advocate for supporting education with AI tools, the impact that overreliance on the tech could have on skill development, intellectual standards, and research integrity — particularly at the college level — is yet to be seen.
