Adopt $\neq$ Adapt: Longitudinal Analyses of LLM Conversations in the Wild

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 27 May 2026] Adopt \neq Adapt: Longitudinal Analyses of LLM Conversations in the Wild Rebecca M. M. Hicke, Kiran Tomlinson Although a growing body of research has begun to describe user--LLM interactions, the picture it paints is largely static; little is known about how individual users change their behavior over time. To address this gap, we analyze the conversational trajectories of \sim12,000 randomly sampled Microsoft Bing Copilot users and compare these with data from WildChat-4.8M. While the Copilot data contains significant population-level trends, we find that trends in individual user trajectories are much weaker; user habits prove to be overwhelmingly sticky. We also find stark differences between users of different activity levels: more active users have more successful conversations and use the LLM for more complex and professionally oriented tasks. Some user trends also appear in WildChat-4.8M, but we find evidence that this dataset is significantly skewed towards highly proficient "power" users. Ultimately, our results suggest that existing user behavior is difficult to change and demonstrate the extent of user heterogeneity. Our comparison between datasets highlights that WildChat does not represent typical user-AI interactions, an important caveat for downstream uses of the data. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL) Cite as: arXiv:2605.29018 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2605.29018v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.29018 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Rebecca M. M. Hicke [view email] [v1] Wed, 27 May 2026 19:17:25 UTC (1,232 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs cs.CL References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)