Study of 12,000 adults finds AI chats feel good, backfire

More than 12,000 French adults spent four weeks testing whether AI chatbots could ease loneliness. The chatbot conversations felt more enjoyable than the interactions the control group had without them, but the people having those chats also reported rising loneliness, falling life satisfaction, and more depressive affect by the study's end.

The team of researchers from the Munich-based economic research institute CESifo monitored 12,365 adults for 28 days in their working paper. In one half of the group, participants were having personal chats with the AI chatbot during that period while the other half followed their usual life schedule.

While the group which had personal chats with the AI reported having more pleasant communication than the control group did with people, they also claimed to have more solo meals and spend less face-to-face time with friends and relatives per week.

Louis Fréget, the researcher, said to Fortune that he thinks those who were talking to the AI may have their "grievances reinforced or rumination prolonged", which made them unwilling to talk to another person later.

University of Chicago behavioural scientist Nicholas Epley said the gap comes down to what a chatbot conversation actually delivers. Talking to an AI doesn't produce the sense of being known by another person, he said, so despite feeling pleasant in the moment, it fails to generate real connection.

According to Professor Valeria Pfeifer from the University of Missouri–Kansas City, whose research shows people now employ 30% fewer words than they did two decades ago, the same applies to any kind of written and typed interactions because the conversations of equal depth are psychologically less significant when held not in person but via texting.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes people want more social contact, and AI can facilitate it. According to the KPMG survey, 99% of workers were interested in a chatbot capable of being a great friend at work.

However, there is not unanimity in academic studies on whether chatbots decrease loneliness. A certain study shows that first-year college students who interacted every day with an artificial intelligence designed to become "the ideal friend" did not experience any change in their feelings of loneliness, unlike those who talked with a randomly selected human partner.

Not all findings point the same direction. A New York pilot program that had nearly 1,000 older adults interact with an AI chatbot reported a decline in loneliness among participants.

But Hastings Center bioethicist Nancy Berlinger cautioned that a chatbot "is not going to replace all of that richness of relationships", even if the temporary relief it offers isn't nothing.