People share LLM subscriptions. When they know others can see their prompts, they change what they ask.
Song et al. (arXiv:2603.22822) surveyed 245 participants and interviewed 36 about sharing ChatGPT and similar accounts. Four distinct sharing patterns emerged. Users develop subtle social conventions around shared access — who uses it when, what topics are acceptable, how to handle the prompt history — that function like the norms of a shared diary or a party-line telephone.
The observer effect is the key finding. Participants consciously modify their prompts when they know a shared account preserves interaction history visible to others. They avoid personal topics. They phrase questions more carefully. They suppress curiosity about sensitive or embarrassing subjects. The LLM becomes a semi-public space, and the behavior shifts accordingly.
This is not a technology problem — it's a social one. The LLM doesn't care who's asking. The subscription model doesn't require sharing. But the cost of premium subscriptions ($20/month, $200/month for some) creates economic pressure to share, and sharing creates social pressure to perform. The user is no longer talking to a private assistant. They're talking to an assistant in a room with an audience.
The conventions are fragile. Unlike shared Netflix accounts (where viewing history is low-stakes), shared LLM accounts expose cognitive activity — what you're curious about, confused by, working on, worried about. The prompt history is more revealing than a search history because LLM conversations are dialogic: the follow-up questions show not just what you wanted to know but how you think.
The paper positions LLM account sharing as “a social practice of appropriation” — users adapting a tool designed for individual use into a shared resource, and in doing so, creating new norms that fundamentally alter the tool's function. The private AI assistant becomes a shared performance space. The most powerful feature — unbounded, judgment-free interaction — is the first casualty of sharing.