Artificial intelligence has quickly become a central actor in India’s digital landscape, shaping not only technological practices but also the contours of social life. Among the many applications of AI, conversational systems like ChatGPT have acquired special significance. In India, a country marked by extraordinary linguistic diversity, deep educational stratification, and rapidly changing labor markets, ChatGPT is not merely a tool for information retrieval or task automation. It is also a stage where everyday users articulate their anxieties, aspirations, and imaginations. The raw prompts that users input into ChatGPT are more than functional queries—they are windows into the socio-cultural fabric of a society negotiating globalization, technological transformation, and historical inequalities. While most scholarship on large language models emphasizes algorithmic performance, ethics, or technical evaluation, much less attention has been paid to the cultural and social meanings embedded in the very act of prompting.
This study addresses that gap by conducting a retrospective analysis of 238 unedited user prompts from Indian ChatGPT interactions. Through a combination of critical discourse analysis and thematic coding, the research asks: What kinds of social anxieties and imaginaries emerge in these digital conversations? How do issues of education, gender, identity, and technology surface in the ways users frame their interactions? And what do these prompts reveal about the tension between global and local linguistic practices, particularly the interplay of English and vernacular languages? By treating prompts as a mirror of social realities, this article argues that ChatGPT dialogues in India are not only technical exchanges but also enactments of power, aspiration, and cultural reproduction. In so doing, the paper contributes both to academic debates on AI and society, and to public understanding of how digital technologies are woven into the textures of everyday life in one of the world’s most dynamic societies.
The foundation of this study rests on a corpus of 238 unedited user prompts submitted to ChatGPT by Indian users across different temporal and situational contexts. Unlike curated or sanitized datasets, these prompts were collected in their original form, including spelling inconsistencies, informal syntax, code-switching between English and vernacular languages, and culturally specific references. The decision to work with unedited prompts was deliberate: it preserves the authenticity of how users actually interact with conversational AI in everyday life, rather than how they might wish to present themselves in more formal settings.
India presents an especially fertile context for such research. With over 700 million internet users, an expanding smartphone economy, and government initiatives such as Digital India, the country has rapidly embraced AI tools. Yet this digital expansion is deeply uneven, intersecting with socioeconomic disparities, linguistic hierarchies, and educational divides. In such a context, ChatGPT becomes more than a convenience—it is a mediator of access, opportunity, and self-expression. Studying how Indian users frame their prompts allows us to glimpse the situated imaginaries that shape technology adoption in a postcolonial, multilingual society.
The sample of 238 prompts, while not exhaustive, is large enough to reveal recurring themes yet small enough to allow for close reading and contextual analysis. By selecting prompts without editing, the study accepts the “messiness” of digital interaction as data, rather than treating it as noise to be cleaned away. This methodological choice is aligned with critical discourse approaches that value everyday expressions as sites of meaning-making.
Analyzing unedited user data raises immediate ethical concerns. Prompts may contain personal information, emotionally sensitive content, or language that reflects private struggles. To address this, three protective measures were implemented:
Anonymization: No identifying details—such as names, locations, or contact information—are reported in the analysis. Any references that might inadvertently reveal identity have been redacted or paraphrased while retaining the semantic essence.
Contextual Sensitivity: The analysis refrains from sensationalizing or pathologizing user inputs. For example, prompts related to mental health or gendered experiences are approached as reflections of broader social structures rather than individualized pathology.
Ethical Framing: Following guidelines from the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and broader AI ethics communities (Floridi & Cowls, 2019), this study treats prompts as social artifacts, not as opportunities for judgment. The aim is to illuminate structural dynamics of education, gender, and cultural identity, not to scrutinize individuals.
By embedding these safeguards, the research aligns with the principle of do no harm while still making use of valuable raw material to uncover cultural insights.
The study employs a two-pronged methodological strategy:
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA): Building on Fairclough (1995) and Wodak (2015), CDA is used to interrogate the power relations and ideological underpinnings embedded in the prompts. For instance, the choice of English over Hindi (or vice versa) is not a neutral linguistic preference but a marker of social aspiration, exclusion, or resistance. CDA enables the study to link micro-level linguistic choices with macro-level cultural structures.
Thematic Analysis: Following Braun and Clarke (2006), thematic coding was applied to identify recurrent patterns across the dataset. Prompts were coded inductively, allowing themes to emerge organically rather than being imposed a priori. Three primary thematic clusters surfaced:
Educational and occupational anxieties
Gender and identity negotiations
Technological dependence and imaginaries of the future
These themes correspond to broader social concerns in contemporary India, confirming that digital interaction cannot be disentangled from cultural context.
The analytical process unfolded in three stages:
Initial Coding: Each prompt was read closely and assigned descriptive codes such as “exam preparation,” “marriage advice,” “career decision,” “emotional support,” or “language switching.” This stage generated a wide inventory of possible categories.
Theme Consolidation: Codes were then grouped into higher-order categories. For example, prompts coded as “resume writing,” “job interview,” and “overseas applications” were consolidated under “occupational anxieties.” Similarly, “relationship conflict” and “family duty” codes were subsumed under “gendered identity negotiations.”
Contextual Interpretation: The final stage involved situating these themes within the broader socio-cultural context of India. For example, the high frequency of English-language prompts related to education was interpreted not merely as linguistic convenience, but as a manifestation of English as a marker of social mobility and class distinction. Here, CDA provided the tools to connect user utterances with historical legacies of colonialism and contemporary neoliberal globalization.
Given my professional affiliations within international computational linguistics and broader academic communities, it is important to acknowledge reflexivity. My position as a researcher from within the global AI discourse inevitably shapes interpretation. To counterbalance this, the analysis consciously resists viewing Indian prompts as “deficient” compared to Western norms. Instead, the aim is to foreground the cultural creativity and resilience embedded in how Indian users appropriate ChatGPT for their own needs.
Reflexivity also demands recognition that prompts are partial windows into social life—they capture moments of articulation but not the full complexity of lived experience. Thus, conclusions are drawn with caution, framed as tendencies and imaginaries rather than definitive claims about all Indian users.
By combining unedited data, ethical sensitivity, CDA, and thematic analysis, this study contributes a novel methodological lens to the study of human–AI interaction. It positions prompts not as mere inputs for machine processing, but as cultural texts that encapsulate anxieties, aspirations, and power struggles. This methodological choice enriches both computational linguistics and digital sociology by offering a template for future cross-cultural studies of AI interaction.
One of the most striking patterns across the 238 prompts was the persistent presence of education- and career-related concerns. This is hardly surprising given the centrality of education in India’s social and economic mobility structures. For decades, Indian families have invested heavily in education as the primary pathway to upward mobility, particularly through competitive examinations such as the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) for engineering, and the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE). In the dataset, a significant proportion of prompts directly referenced exam preparation, study strategies, or request for model answers.
For example, users frequently asked ChatGPT to provide concise notes on complex subjects, draft essays for university applications, or generate practice questions in mathematics and computer science. These requests reflect not only the burden of academic competition but also the outsourcing of cognitive labor to AI tools. Here, ChatGPT is framed less as a conversational partner and more as a surrogate tutor capable of delivering structured and reliable content.
Occupational anxieties extend naturally from this educational context. Many prompts asked for resume writing assistance, interview preparation, or guidance on overseas applications, particularly to universities in the United States, United Kingdom, or Australia. The heavy emphasis on migration-related prompts underscores a deeply rooted aspiration: for many Indian students and professionals, success is tied to international mobility and the acquisition of global credentials. These prompts often blended English-dominant phrasing with technical jargon, suggesting that users associated English fluency with employability in global labor markets.
Yet not all career-related prompts were aspirational. Some reflected anxiety and uncertainty, asking whether a particular degree would lead to stable employment or whether emerging fields such as data science or AI itself were viable career paths. Such queries reveal how digital technologies simultaneously create new opportunities and exacerbate precarity, as individuals attempt to anticipate market shifts in an economy where automation threatens traditional jobs.
From a critical perspective, these educational and occupational prompts expose the structural inequities of Indian society. While elite students leverage ChatGPT as a supplementary resource, others may depend on it as a compensatory mechanism due to lack of access to quality teachers or institutions. Thus, the same tool may reinforce existing hierarchies while also providing novel forms of access.
A second theme concerns how users engaged with questions of gender, identity, and relational roles. Several prompts, though not the majority, explicitly referenced marriage, relationships, or gendered expectations. For instance, women users occasionally asked for advice on balancing career ambitions with familial duties, or how to navigate parental expectations regarding arranged marriage. Men, by contrast, sometimes sought strategies for impressing potential partners or dealing with the emotional fallout of rejection.
These prompts reveal how traditional gender roles continue to shape digital expression, even in technologically advanced contexts. Marriage remains a deeply institutionalized expectation in Indian society, and prompts framed in this domain often reflect the tension between individual autonomy and collective cultural norms. For instance, a young woman asking ChatGPT how to persuade her parents to allow her to pursue higher education abroad signals both the persistence of patriarchal constraints and the hope that AI might provide rhetorical strategies to challenge them.
Beyond marriage, identity-related prompts also surfaced in relation to personal confidence, self-expression, and negotiation of modernity. Some users asked ChatGPT to generate motivational speeches or help compose social media posts in “perfect English,” suggesting a desire not only for communication but also for performative legitimacy in digital publics. Here, the act of prompting is an act of identity construction: the user seeks to align themselves with cosmopolitan, English-speaking norms that carry prestige in India’s stratified social order.
Interestingly, a handful of prompts engaged with sensitive gender and sexuality issues. These were often phrased cautiously, reflecting stigma and lack of safe offline spaces for such conversations. By turning to ChatGPT, users implicitly positioned the AI as a non-judgmental confidant, a role difficult to find in traditional familial or community structures. Such interactions illustrate how AI can open new avenues for self-exploration, but they also highlight the limitations of algorithmic empathy when individuals seek genuine social support.
Critically, these gendered and identity-related prompts expose the layered inequalities of digital interaction. Access to ChatGPT does not erase patriarchy or stigma; instead, it relocates them into new terrains of negotiation. The prompts illustrate how AI is situated within broader power structures, sometimes reinforcing norms, sometimes providing subversive possibilities.
The third thematic cluster involves how users framed ChatGPT itself—not merely as a tool but as a symbol of technological possibility and dependency. Many prompts positioned the AI as a study partner, requesting daily schedules, motivational quotes, or step-by-step problem solving. Others sought advice on highly personal decisions, such as whether to switch careers, invest in a business, or pursue a relationship. In these cases, ChatGPT was not just a source of information but a decision-making companion.
This phenomenon can be interpreted as an extension of broader global trends, where algorithmic systems increasingly mediate everyday choices. However, in the Indian context, the dependence also reflects the scarcity of reliable human mentorship. For students lacking access to professional counselors or career advisors, ChatGPT becomes a readily available surrogate authority.
Future imaginaries were another recurring subtheme. Some users asked ChatGPT about the impact of AI on jobs, the role of automation in India’s economy, or the future of education. These prompts oscillated between optimism and fear: optimism that AI could democratize opportunities, fear that it could render their hard-earned skills obsolete. The very act of asking ChatGPT about the future of AI reveals a reflexive dynamic—the tool is not only used but also interrogated as an agent shaping the user’s destiny.
From a cultural standpoint, this reveals the ambivalence of technological adoption in postcolonial societies. On the one hand, users imagine AI as a democratizing force, bypassing bureaucratic inefficiencies and social hierarchies. On the other hand, they sense that technology might exacerbate inequalities, concentrating opportunities among those already privileged by English fluency, digital literacy, and economic capital.
These future-oriented prompts also reflect what scholars of digital culture call “sociotechnical imaginaries” (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015): collectively held visions of desirable futures that guide technological adoption. In India, such imaginaries are deeply entangled with narratives of national development, global competitiveness, and individual success. By asking ChatGPT to predict or shape their future, users participate in the co-construction of these imaginaries, embedding AI into the very grammar of aspiration.
Taken together, these three clusters—educational/occupational anxieties, gender/identity negotiations, and technological dependence/future imaginaries—paint a complex picture of how ChatGPT is woven into the fabric of Indian digital society. The prompts reveal that users do not treat AI as neutral infrastructure; rather, they actively embed it in their struggles, hopes, and identities.
At a macro level, the analysis demonstrates that AI prompts function as cultural texts: they crystallize the intersections of education systems, labor markets, gender relations, and technological visions. They also highlight the paradox of digital tools in unequal societies: while ChatGPT may offer new forms of empowerment, it can simultaneously reinforce preexisting hierarchies.
If user prompts can be read as micro-narratives of social life, then their cultural resonance lies not merely in what they explicitly ask but also in how they frame, encode, and negotiate authority. In the 238 unedited Indian ChatGPT prompts, cultural reproduction appears through subtle linguistic choices, symbolic references, and the relational positioning of the AI as either a peer or a superior. This section unpacks three central dimensions: (1) language choice and class metaphors, (2) the tension between globalization and localization, and (3) the cultural positioning of AI as both authoritative advisor and intimate companion. Together, these patterns reveal how ChatGPT has become a stage for negotiating power, aspiration, and identity.
Language in India is never neutral. With English occupying a privileged position in education, administration, and corporate employment, and vernacular languages such as Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, or Telugu mediating emotional and domestic domains, the choice of prompt language itself is a performative act. Roughly two-thirds of the 238 prompts were submitted in English, while a substantial minority employed Hindi or a hybrid of English and local expressions (“Hinglish”).
The English prompts tended to center on questions of academic performance, professional development, and migration aspirations—for example, “How should I prepare for GRE verbal?” or “Draft a statement of purpose for studying computer science abroad.” These queries reflect middle-class and aspirant-class investments in English as a symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1991), a gateway to elite educational institutions and global labor markets. In contrast, prompts written in Hindi often revolved around interpersonal dilemmas, marriage advice, or emotional expression, such as “Shaadi ke baad career kaise balance karein?” (“How to balance career after marriage?”). Here, vernacular language signals not only accessibility but also intimacy and vulnerability, reflecting spheres where users sought culturally resonant advice rather than formal, globally codified knowledge.
This dualism underscores a latent class metaphor: English indexes upward mobility, cosmopolitan belonging, and rational professionalism, while vernacular languages encode the affective, relational, and “ordinary.” The AI, positioned to respond seamlessly in either register, becomes a mediator across these social strata. However, this linguistic split also risks reinforcing the symbolic hierarchy where English dominates as the “serious” language of aspiration, subtly marginalizing non-English epistemologies.
The prompts also vividly illustrate the push-and-pull between globalized imaginaries and local rootedness. On one side, users demonstrated dependency on English-based global standards—requests for model CVs, templates for international scholarship applications, or essay drafts for U.S. or U.K. universities. These interactions suggest that ChatGPT is perceived as a shortcut to mastering global literacies, aligning with what Appadurai (1996) calls the “global cultural economy.”
On the other side, however, prompts reflect resistance or negotiation with local values and practices. Several users explicitly asked ChatGPT to translate or contextualize global ideas for Indian settings: e.g., “Explain blockchain in simple Hindi for farmers,” or “Make a motivational speech in Tamil for school students.” Here, users mobilize AI to bridge global discourses with vernacular publics, performing what García & Wei (2014) describe as translanguaging practices, where the boundary between global English and local tongues becomes fluid.
This dual dynamic reflects a hybrid cultural economy: India’s digital users embrace global narratives of progress and competitiveness, but simultaneously demand their rearticulation in culturally legible idioms. ChatGPT thus occupies a paradoxical role—both as an entry point into global epistemic systems and as a translator of those systems into local cultural frames. This tension raises critical questions: Will AI inadvertently normalize English dominance in digital spaces, or will it empower multilingual users to assert vernacular knowledges on new platforms?
Perhaps the most striking cultural reproduction lies in how users framed ChatGPT itself. In many prompts, AI was addressed not as a neutral tool but as a quasi-social actor. Some positioned ChatGPT as an authoritative advisor: “Give me the best legal argument to defend property rights” or “Act like an IELTS examiner and evaluate my essay.” In these cases, AI was cast as an institutional proxy, standing in for teachers, examiners, or lawyers—figures traditionally tied to authority and gatekeeping.
Yet in other instances, ChatGPT was imagined as a confidant or virtual companion. Prompts included “Talk to me like a friend about stress,” or “Write a love poem I can send to my girlfriend.” These requests exemplify what Turkle (2011) describes as the psychological projection onto machines, where users anthropomorphize digital systems as affective partners. In the Indian context, where social hierarchies and norms often limit open emotional expression, ChatGPT becomes an alternate, nonjudgmental space for self-disclosure.
This dual positioning—authority and intimacy—illustrates AI’s cultural ambivalence. On one hand, it reproduces hierarchical relations by substituting for institutional gatekeepers. On the other hand, it subverts these hierarchies by offering emotional refuge outside traditional family or social structures. The very fact that a single technology can oscillate between these roles highlights its embeddedness in power negotiations: between state and citizen, teacher and student, husband and wife, global and local.
Underlying these dynamics are deeper questions of power. By privileging certain languages, templates, and communicative norms, ChatGPT is not simply reflecting user input—it is reinforcing epistemic hierarchies. For instance, when users requested English academic essays, the outputs mirrored Western rhetorical conventions (linear argumentation, five-paragraph structures), subtly privileging Anglophone epistemologies over indigenous rhetorical forms. Similarly, prompts asking for career guidance often presupposed the tech sector as the pinnacle of aspiration, reinforcing the centrality of neoliberal digital capitalism in shaping Indian imaginaries of success.
At the same time, the dataset also revealed pockets of resistance. Some users challenged the model by asking it to generate folk tales, local proverbs, or devotional songs, thereby reinscribing cultural traditions into the digital medium. Such acts suggest that while AI may replicate global power structures, users also deploy it as a tool for cultural preservation and reappropriation.
In this sense, ChatGPT functions less as a neutral platform and more as a contested cultural arena. Its responses are shaped by training data predominantly sourced from global English corpora, yet its users bring vernacular demands, emotional needs, and culturally specific frames. The negotiation between these poles crystallizes the broader contradictions of India’s digital modernity: aspiration and alienation, empowerment and exclusion, globalization and localization.
Taken together, the prompts analyzed in this section reveal that cultural representation in Indian ChatGPT use is not accidental but deeply patterned. Language operates as a symbolic resource for class positioning, global-local tensions emerge as central to digital communication, and AI is anthropomorphized into roles that reflect both hierarchy and intimacy. More importantly, these practices expose underlying power structures: who gets to define knowledge, whose voices are privileged, and how digital platforms mediate social reproduction. Far from being a passive mirror, ChatGPT is implicated in the cultural politics of India’s digital society, simultaneously enabling and constraining new modes of expression.
The preceding sections have traced how 238 unedited Indian ChatGPT prompts reveal layered social anxieties, cultural representations, and negotiations of power. While the thematic and cultural analyses presented specific findings—such as the dominance of education-related queries, gendered dilemmas, and the symbolic hierarchy between English and vernacular languages—this section steps back to consider their broader significance. What do these patterns tell us about the cultural role of AI in Indian society? How do they reflect, reinforce, or disrupt existing inequalities? And what does it mean to understand ChatGPT not simply as a tool but as a sociotechnical actor embedded within cultural imaginaries?
A central insight from the analysis is that ChatGPT functions in a dual capacity. On the one hand, it is undeniably a pragmatic tool—users employ it to draft résumés, prepare exam essays, or translate technical concepts. On the other hand, it has also become a symbolic space where social aspirations and anxieties are rehearsed. The very act of typing into ChatGPT is not just about seeking information; it is about performing identity, voicing vulnerability, and engaging with an imagined interlocutor that represents both authority and intimacy.
This dual role echoes Latour’s (2005) actor-network theory, which emphasizes that technologies are never merely neutral instruments but also active participants in social networks. In India, ChatGPT is more than a linguistic engine—it is a proxy for institutional gatekeepers (teachers, employers, examiners) and at the same time a stand-in for intimate companions (friends, confidants). This simultaneity complicates simplistic narratives of AI adoption, demanding that we recognize its embeddedness in symbolic economies as much as in technical infrastructures.
The prevalence of education- and career-related prompts underscores the centrality of meritocratic aspiration in India’s digital society. Yet this also points to a paradox. While AI may appear to democratize access to knowledge, the dominance of English-language academic queries highlights a structural inequality: those fluent in English gain greater benefit from AI systems trained primarily on Anglophone corpora, while vernacular speakers remain disadvantaged.
Similarly, prompts around gender roles and marriage dilemmas reveal how AI becomes a forum where private struggles intersect with public technologies. Women’s queries about balancing career and marriage, for instance, indicate not only personal uncertainty but also structural constraints in gendered labor markets. ChatGPT is being asked to “fill the gap” where social support structures fail, reflecting what feminist scholars such as Nussbaum (2000) describe as the persistent denial of women’s agency within patriarchal frameworks.
Together, these patterns suggest that ChatGPT is implicated in reproducing existing inequalities—linguistic, gendered, and educational—while also offering spaces of negotiation. A male student may seek elite pathways through English-mediated prompts, while a young woman may turn to AI for advice that her family or peers deny her. Thus, ChatGPT both exacerbates and mitigates inequalities, depending on the context.
The tension between global English and local vernaculars exemplifies what Robertson (1995) terms glocalization—the simultaneous universalization and particularization of culture. Indian users do not simply consume global English discourses wholesale; they appropriate them, translate them, and demand contextualization into local idioms. When a user asks ChatGPT to explain blockchain in Hindi for farmers, it is not just a technical translation request—it is an assertion that global technological narratives must be legible within local lifeworlds.
Yet glocalization does not occur on equal terms. English remains the “default” of technical expertise, while vernacular requests are often framed as secondary or “simplified.” This hierarchy reflects deeper epistemic asymmetries: global (read: Western) knowledge is treated as universal, while local knowledges must be adjusted, translated, or simplified. Such dynamics risk reinforcing the epistemic dominance of Anglophone paradigms, even as users attempt to reclaim cultural space within AI-mediated interactions.
Another striking finding is the dual role assigned to ChatGPT as authoritative advisor and virtual friend. This anthropomorphization raises important questions about how power and intimacy are negotiated in digital contexts. When users treat ChatGPT as an examiner, they implicitly legitimize its authority; when they treat it as a confidant, they signal trust in its discretion and neutrality.
Critically, this dynamic illustrates what Couldry and Hepp (2017) call the deep mediatization of society, where media technologies increasingly organize not only communication but also social relations and emotional lives. In the Indian context, where hierarchical authority figures dominate education and family spheres, AI provides an alternative form of authority that is predictable, nonjudgmental, and accessible 24/7. At the same time, by offering companionship, AI disrupts traditional boundaries of intimacy, creating new affective economies where machines are entrusted with emotions once reserved for human relations.
This duality is ambivalent. On the one hand, it empowers individuals to articulate needs they might suppress in human interactions. On the other hand, it risks deepening technological dependence, outsourcing not only cognitive but also emotional labor to machines. Such a shift has profound cultural implications, potentially reshaping how authority and intimacy are conceptualized in future Indian society.
What emerges, then, is a view of ChatGPT not as a passive conduit but as a cultural arena where power is contested. Prompts that request elite English essays reproduce existing hierarchies, while prompts that ask for folk tales or devotional songs reassert vernacular epistemologies. In this sense, ChatGPT becomes a site of cultural struggle—between aspiration and authenticity, modernity and tradition, global authority and local agency.
This echoes Hall’s (1997) insight that representation is always bound up with power: what is represented, and how, reflects and shapes who gets to speak and whose voices are marginalized. The Indian prompts show that even at the micro-level of digital interaction, representation is not trivial—it encodes cultural politics with real consequences for identity, belonging, and opportunity.
From a governance perspective, these findings highlight the urgency of recognizing AI as a sociocultural actor, not merely a technical infrastructure. If ChatGPT systematically privileges English and Western epistemologies, policymakers must consider mechanisms to promote multilingual fairness and cultural adaptability. Likewise, if users are turning to AI for gendered dilemmas, this signals the need to integrate gender-sensitive perspectives into AI design and deployment.
Moreover, the ambivalent role of ChatGPT as both authority and confidant raises ethical concerns about trust, dependency, and transparency. Should AI platforms acknowledge their limitations more explicitly when responding to emotionally sensitive prompts? Should there be safeguards to prevent overreliance on AI for decisions that have real social and psychological consequences? These questions demand urgent attention, especially in societies like India where digital adoption is rapid but regulatory frameworks are still evolving.
In synthesizing these insights, it becomes clear that ChatGPT is not simply a neutral innovation but a mirror and mediator of India’s digital modernity. It reflects existing inequalities (linguistic, gendered, educational) while also creating new spaces for negotiation and expression. It embodies global aspirations while also being appropriated into local practices. And it oscillates between authority and intimacy, reconfiguring how Indians imagine relationships with both institutions and individuals.
A critical understanding of AI must therefore resist reductionism. ChatGPT is neither purely emancipatory nor purely oppressive. Rather, it is ambivalent and contested, simultaneously enabling and constraining. Its social significance lies not in its technical performance alone but in the cultural imaginaries it reproduces and reshapes.
The critical discussion demonstrates that Indian ChatGPT prompts are not random or trivial; they are social texts that condense the complexities of aspiration, inequality, and cultural negotiation. To view AI as only a tool is to miss its role as a social symbol and cultural actor. By interrogating its ambivalence—its duality as tool and symbol, authority and confidant, global and local—we uncover the broader cultural politics of AI in Indian society.
This study began with a simple corpus of 238 unedited ChatGPT prompts submitted by Indian users. Yet the analysis revealed that these fragments of digital interaction are far from trivial: they are windows into the collective psyche of a society negotiating rapid technological change. Across the dataset, three interwoven themes emerged. First, education and occupational anxieties dominated, reflecting both India’s competitive meritocratic culture and the uneven accessibility of quality education. Second, gender and identity negotiations surfaced, especially around marriage, family duty, and women’s balancing of career and domestic roles. Third, technological imaginaries appeared, with ChatGPT envisioned alternately as a “study partner,” “decision-making assistant,” and even a “virtual confidant.”
Building on these themes, the cultural analysis highlighted deeper patterns: the hierarchy between English and vernacular languages, the glocal tension between global technological authority and local cultural traditions, and the anthropomorphization of AI as both authority and companion. Taken together, these findings suggest that ChatGPT is not merely a tool for information retrieval but also a site of cultural representation and power negotiation.
The critical discussion showed that AI technologies such as ChatGPT are deeply implicated in reproducing, but also reshaping, existing inequalities. By privileging English inputs, they reinforce linguistic hierarchies. By responding to gendered dilemmas, they become entangled in patriarchal constraints. Yet they also open new spaces for agency—where vernacular voices can demand recognition, where women can articulate dilemmas otherwise silenced, and where individuals can bypass institutional gatekeepers.
Thus, ChatGPT embodies a paradox: it is both empowering and limiting, both global and local, both authority and confidant. To navigate this paradox responsibly, governance must address not only the technical but also the cultural dimensions of AI adoption.
Based on the findings, several policy and design interventions are proposed:
(a) Educational Equity and Multilingual Fairness
AI tools must expand robust support for India’s diverse linguistic ecosystem, ensuring that Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, and other languages receive equal treatment alongside English.
Government and private sectors should invest in multilingual NLP research that does not merely “translate” English knowledge but builds localized models trained on regional corpora.
In education, AI should be positioned as a supplementary aid rather than a replacement for teachers, with emphasis on equitable access for students from rural and marginalized communities.
(b) Gender-Sensitive AI Design
Developers must integrate gender-sensitive training data and moderation protocols that avoid reproducing stereotypes or reinforcing patriarchal norms.
Public awareness campaigns could emphasize responsible use of AI for personal dilemmas, complemented by stronger social and institutional support systems for gender equity.
Policy frameworks should ensure that AI does not become an “invisible substitute” for social services, particularly in contexts where women disproportionately bear the costs of inequality.
(c) Ethical AI Governance and Digital Literacy
Transparency standards should require AI systems to clearly communicate their limitations, especially when responding to emotionally sensitive prompts.
Digital literacy programs must equip users to critically evaluate AI outputs, distinguishing between machine-generated authority and human expertise.
Regulators should establish ethical oversight mechanisms for conversational AI, focusing not only on data privacy but also on cultural adaptability and fairness.
(d) Cross-Cultural Research Value
India’s case offers lessons for the global South more broadly. By foregrounding issues of multilingualism, inequality, and cultural hybridity, this study shows how AI governance cannot be one-size-fits-all.
Future research should compare Indian prompts with those from other contexts—such as Nigeria, Brazil, or Indonesia—to identify both shared patterns and unique trajectories of AI appropriation.
The corpus of 238 prompts underscores a larger point: AI is as much a cultural phenomenon as it is a technological one. It mediates aspiration, anxiety, and identity in ways that technical benchmarks alone cannot capture. If India—and the world—is to harness AI responsibly, policies must embrace this cultural reflexivity.
Educational systems should foster AI literacy grounded in local realities. Governance must ensure that algorithms serve as bridges, not barriers, to social inclusion. And designers must recognize that in societies like India, AI is not simply a productivity tool but a participant in ongoing struggles over language, gender, and modernity.
In conclusion, the analysis of Indian ChatGPT prompts demonstrates that digital interactions are mirrors of social imagination and cultural reproduction. They reveal both the fractures and the possibilities of India’s digital society. By treating AI not only as infrastructure but also as a cultural interlocutor, we can move toward a future where technology is not only efficient but also ethical, inclusive, and just.
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