Lonely People Are Even Sadder After Using Chatbots, Research Finds

OpenAI and the MIT Media Lab last week released two new studies aimed at exploring the effect of AI chatbots on loneliness. The results are complicated, but they also line up with what we now know about social media: Chatbots can make people lonely, but the people who reported feeling more alone after heavy use of an AI tended to feel pretty alone before they started. To do the studies, OpenAI turned over almost 40 million interactions its users had with ChatGPT to researchers at MIT. In the first study, MIT looked at the “aggregate usage” of around 6,000 “heavy users of ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode over 3 months” and surveyed 4,076 specific users to understand how the chatbot made them feel. In the second study, the researchers looked at how 981 participants interacted with ChatGPT over the course of 28 days. The papers are in-depth and complicated and worth a close read. One of the big takeaways is that people who used the chatbots casually and didn’t engage with them emotionally ... Read full article.