2026-05-18 · Shawn Ivie

What can older adults actually do with ChatGPT? 12 concrete examples from real users

Adults between 65 and 85 are using ChatGPT in 2026 mostly for four kinds of tasks: writing things that are hard to start (thank-you notes, eulogies, complaint letters), preparing for conversations (doctor visits, calls with the bank, talks with adult children), simplifying paperwork (insurance letters, Medicare statements, lease agreements), and remembering or shaping personal history (family stories, life summaries, recipe notes). It is not used as a doctor, a lawyer, or a search engine for facts that have to be exactly right.

When people ask me what their seventy-something parent is supposed to do with ChatGPT once it's set up, I have learned not to answer in the abstract. Abstract answers — "it's a writing assistant" — produce a polite nod and a blank box. What works is the specific example. The exact sentence to type. What comes back. Why it matters at the kitchen table on a Tuesday.

What follows is twelve of those examples, drawn from the people in my own life who have been using ChatGPT for at least six months and from the hundred-odd customers who have written back to me since we started shipping the binder. The twelve fall cleanly into four groups. Read whichever group sounds most like your week.

Group one — Everyday questions

1. "Simplify this letter from the insurance company."

The insurance letter arrives. It is four pages long. The font is the size of a grain of rice. Three of the pages are legal disclaimers and the fourth contains the one sentence that matters, buried in a paragraph that begins Notwithstanding the foregoing. You paste the readable parts into ChatGPT — no policy number, no name, no Social Security number — and type: Explain this letter to me in plain English in five sentences. Then tell me what, if anything, I have to do. What comes back is a summary that is right about ninety percent of the time, plus a list of actions if there are any. You then go back to the original and read the action paragraph carefully, because the original is what you have to act on. The summary is for understanding, not for signing. This is the single use case my own father has returned to most often, and the one that turned him from skeptic to user inside the first month.

2. "What is this medication, and what is it usually prescribed for?"

You bring home a new prescription. The pharmacist explained it at the counter. By the time you got to the car you had forgotten the second half of what she said. You type: What is metoprolol succinate, what is it usually prescribed for, and what are the most common side effects people report? ChatGPT gives you a clean three-paragraph summary that mirrors what the pharmacist said, in language you can re-read at your own pace. This is not medical advice — it does not know your kidneys, your other prescriptions, or your blood pressure — but it is the kind of plain explanation that used to require a forty-minute phone call with a knowledgeable cousin. For follow-up questions about your specific case, you still call the doctor. The model is a vocabulary tutor, not a clinician.

3. "Help me write down four questions to ask at my appointment Tuesday."

This is, quietly, the most valuable thing the tool does for anyone over 65, and the use I see grandchildren most often surprised by. You type your situation in one paragraph — age, condition, last numbers, the appointment coming up — and ask for the four questions a thoughtful person would have asked. ChatGPT produces them. You print the list. You take it with you. The National Institute on Aging has been recommending pre-appointment question lists for years on the plain ground that prepared patients get better care; ChatGPT happens to be a faster question-preparer than most family members. The peer-reviewed gerontology literature — for example, the long-running work of Sara Czaja and colleagues at the Center for Research and Education on Aging and Technology Enhancement (CREATE) — has been making the case for two decades that adults over 65 adopt technology readily when the use case is concrete and tied to a real task they already need to do. The doctor's-visit list is exactly that.

Group two — Writing and correspondence

4. "Help me draft a thank-you note to my neighbor."

The neighbor brought a casserole. The neighbor watered the plants for a week. You want to write something that doesn't sound like a Hallmark card. You type: Help me write a short thank-you note to my neighbor Margaret. She watered my plants every day for the ten days I was at my sister's in Phoenix. She has been a good neighbor for twelve years. I want it to be warm but not too sappy. ChatGPT writes a draft. You change three words. You put it on a card. The whole task takes nine minutes instead of forty-five. According to the AARP's 2024 Tech Trends and Adults 50-Plus report, drafting written correspondence is among the top three reasons adults 50 and older now report using generative AI tools.

5. "Draft a polite-but-firm complaint about a $47 charge I didn't make."

The credit card statement has a $47 charge from a company you've never heard of. You want to write to the bank, in writing, before you call. You type the facts, exactly as they are, and ask for a polite-but-firm letter. The model does this well — it produces the kind of letter that sounds adult and reasonable rather than panicked, which is precisely the tone that gets responses from large companies. You add your account number by hand on the printed copy, not into the chat.

6. "Write a short eulogy for my older brother."

This is the use case I treat with the most care, and the one I have personally watched two people in my own life turn to in the last eighteen months. You type the facts — the name, the age, the work he did, the thing about him that was funny — and ask for a first draft. What ChatGPT produces is not the eulogy you will deliver. It is a first draft you will rewrite five times, in your own voice, before Saturday. The point is not that the model writes better than you. The point is that the model gets you past the empty page, which is the part that paralyzes most people for two of the seven days they have to write it.

Group three — Memory and legacy

7. "Help me write down the story about my grandfather and the 1948 Buick."

You have told the story at twenty Thanksgivings. None of your grandchildren has ever written it down. You type: I want to record a family story. My grandfather, in 1948, bought a used Buick from a man in Pocatello, drove it home, and it broke down twice on the way. The way he told it always made my father laugh. Ask me five questions about the story so we can write down a good version of it. ChatGPT asks the five questions. You answer them. Forty minutes later you have a one-page version of the story, in your voice, that your grandchildren will be able to read in thirty years. This is one of the use cases I personally find the most moving. It is also one of the use cases the OpenAI Help Center memory FAQ makes possible to extend: with the memory feature on, ChatGPT can hold the through-line of a longer family-history project across many sessions, so the second conversation picks up where the first one left off.

8. "Help me organize a list of recipes I want to leave to my daughter."

You have a binder. The binder has a hundred and twenty recipe cards in it. Half of them are not labeled. You want to organize them, type them, and pass them to your daughter without doing all of it at once. You type: I want to make a small recipe collection to give my daughter for her fortieth birthday. I have these twelve favorite recipes [list]. Help me write a short two-sentence introduction for each one, explaining when I started making it and why it matters. ChatGPT writes the twelve introductions. You correct the four that got something wrong. You have a draft of the gift in an hour rather than a year.

9. "Help me prepare what I want to say at my fiftieth-anniversary dinner."

The toast at the anniversary dinner is six weeks away. You know roughly what you want to say. You do not know how to organize it so it lasts the right amount of time and lands on the right note. You type: I have been married fifty years on October 14. We have three children and seven grandchildren. The thing I most want to say is that we got married very young and figured most of it out together. Help me write a four-minute toast. The model writes a draft. You take an hour, sitting at the kitchen table, and turn it into the toast you actually want to give. The model does the structural work. You do the truth-telling.

Group four — Practical help

10. "What can I make for dinner with what I have in the kitchen?"

You have one chicken breast, a can of black beans, half a yellow onion, some rice, and you are not going to the store at six on a Tuesday. You type the list. ChatGPT gives you three options, with the actual steps. If you tell it you have high blood pressure, it adjusts the salt. If you tell it your spouse is diabetic, it adjusts the rice. It is not the best recipe you will ever cook. It is a working dinner at six-fifteen.

11. "Translate this note from my grandchild's teacher."

The note comes home in Spanish, or Tagalog, or Vietnamese. You paste the text in and ask for a plain-English translation, then for an explanation of any phrase that seems odd. ChatGPT does both. For legal documents and medical paperwork in another language, you still want a professional human translator. For a note about a field trip on Friday, the tool is much better than nothing.

12. "Help me write a short, polite text to my adult son about a hard subject."

This is the use case people are least likely to mention in public and most likely to thank me for in private. You have a difficult conversation to have with your adult child — about money, about Thanksgiving, about a thing one of you said in October that didn't sit right. You type the situation and ask for a short, kind text that opens the conversation without escalating it. The model does this calmly, in three sentences, without the emotional charge you would have brought to it at eleven at night. You read the draft. You decide whether to send it. You almost always edit it. Sometimes you decide not to send anything at all, and that is fine too — the act of writing the draft did the work.

A note on getting started

The thing all twelve of these have in common is that they begin with a real task, not a test question. Pew Research notes that 76 percent of Americans 65 and older now own a smartphone, which is to say the device for using ChatGPT is already on the kitchen counter. The thing missing is the on-ramp — the page you can hold in your hand that says here is the question to type first. That is the gap the binder we make is designed to fill.

If you have not yet signed up, I wrote the numbered walkthrough first. If you have signed up and want to know whether what you're typing is safe to type, that's the next piece. If you'd like the broader review of what the tool is and isn't good at for adults over 65, the longer piece is here. And if you'd like the printed setup binder — the one written for a kitchen table, not a phone screen — it's $19 on the pricing page, or you can start with the free one-page plan and decide later.

The tool only ever becomes useful at the moment a real question gets typed into the box. Twelve of them are above. Pick one. Type it today.

— Shawn Ivie Founder, Plain English Company