AI chatbots could help fight the loneliness endemic, Julian De Freitas, PhD, assistant professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School, wrote in an article for The Wall Street Journal.
Loneliness affects about 33% of adults globally and is increasing. Loneliness is known to cause depression and anxiety as well as contribute to physical problems.
"Because we aren’t doing well as a society on loneliness, we should at least keep an open mind on any tool that helps at all," Dr. De Freitas said.
Dr. De Freitas and his colleagues at the Wharton School studied whether AI companion apps could reduce loneliness. They analyzed 50,000 app reviews to find the five most popular AI companion apps.
In the first part of the study, about 1,100 online participants were asked to rate their loneliness on a scale of one to 100 every day. One group interacted with an AI companion app while others didn't. Those who used the AI companion reported significantly less loneliness, with an average reduction of 16 percentage points over the course of a week. Participants who used the AI app also experienced 14 percentage points less loneliness on average from day to day compared to those who did not use a companion app.
In a follow-up study of 600 online participants, people were either asked to interact with an AI companion or with a real person, to browse YouTube videos online or do nothing. They were asked to rate loneliness levels both before and after interacting with their assigned method of reducing loneliness for 15 minutes. Only those who interacted with a real person or AI companion saw a reduction in loneliness, with an average drop of 19 percentage points for those who interacted with a real person and 20 percentage points for those who used an AI companion.
Here were two additional findings:
- The more people used the app specifically to reduce loneliness, the more they got out of them.
- Those who interacted with the AI companion experienced greater average reduction in loneliness (24 percentage points) compared to those who interacted with the AI assistant (6 percentage points).