Post ContentAI chatbots may listen, but it can’t cure loneliness. (Image Source: Pixabay)
AI chatbots are reshaping how people work and live, with many young users increasingly relying on them for everyday tasks and even to cope with loneliness.
Platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini and Character.ai have already faced criticism worldwide, with some claiming they have negatively influenced users’ behaviour and relationships. Now, a new study suggests that talking to real people, even strangers, may be better than relying on chatbots.
The study, conducted by the University of British Columbia, found that first-semester students who texted randomly selected fellow college students every day for 14 days reported a nine per cent reduction in their feeling of loneliness. However, those who talked to a Discord chatbot for the same two-week duration noted reduced loneliness by just two per cent. This is the same amount as daily one-sentence journaling.
The research, which included 300 students in the first semester of their college. While some were randomly paired with others, others were either given a daily writing task they had to do alone or asked to talk to a Discord chatbot powered by ChatGPT-4o mini. In each of these groups, the students were asked to interact at least once every day.
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The study included 300 students in the first semester of their college. (Image Source: Gemini/AI)
Students who talked to their colleagues were allowed to talk however they wanted, but researchers had told the Discord bots to “listen actively and show empathy” and act as a “friendly, positive, and supportive AI friend to help the student navigate their new college experience.”
It was found that students participating in both cases acted quite similarly, as they sent eight to 10 messages per day. But students who talked to humans said that they felt significantly lower loneliness after the study, while those who talked to chatbots didn’t.
The researchers said they preferred college students for the study because they wanted to understand if AI models could help people deal with the isolation they feel when a lot of things are changing in their lives.
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Since the transition to college can be pretty overwhelming for some, researchers said they were trying to figure out if chatbots would emerge as an alternative to humans at such crucial points in life, but found that it wasn’t the case.
“If you measure their feeling of loneliness or social connection right after the interaction, people do feel better, ” said Ruo-Ning Li, a PhD candidate who also happens to be one of the authors of the paper, in a statement to 404 Media.
She added while AI does have some short-term effects on a person’s mood, “making people feel momentarily happy is not that hard.”
Another study by the MIT Media Lab and OpenAI conducted last year studied how conversations with AI models impacted mental well-being and found that while the technology did initially appear beneficial in battling loneliness, increased usage was linked to “higher loneliness, dependence and problematic use, and lower socialization.”
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