Did you know Chatbot Loneliness Crisis? New Study Exposes the Emotional Toll of AI Conversations

 

A new study is opening the eyes of the world to the adverse effects of using chatbots.

Thanks to OpenAI and MIT Media Lab, the research carried out found that those people who spent more time speaking to chatbots like ChatGPT felt lonelier than their counterparts.

The connection was done as part of a series of yet-to-be-vetted research. One of those was done as the company’s surveys targeted users about its products. Over 40M interactions with ChatGPT were taken into account and another study by MIT even followed users’ ChatGPT for several weeks to see the outcome.

The research highlighted new ways of speaking to chatbots, be it via text or voice. This can drastically impact a person’s emotions and goes beyond the results that found that higher use led to greater loneliness and less socialization.

Participants who trusted these chatbots used to get so emotionally attached to them and therefore felt lonelier and more dependent on them emotionally during this study. The effects got less intense in terms of severity when the voice mode of the product was used. For instance, when the chatbot spoke to them in a neutral tone.

After discussing various personal topics, it would give rise to a lot of loneliness in the short term and you’d come across more general topics and be more emotionally dependent.

Another major finding from the study by OpenAI is how many users don’t engage in a lot of emotional chats with the product. Only a small fraction of the participants were engaging in emotionally expressive chats when the Advanced Voice Mode group was studied.

This means that even if the study’s findings are alarming, they are not surprising as it’s not seen in a large group of people. We must discuss how experts pulled out some serious limitations to the study which include how they arose across a short period.

It was just one month for MIT and 28 days for OpenAI. Also, the MIT study failed to compare the findings with a control group. However, the studies are certainly adding more evidence to something that appeared to be true intuitively for quite some time now. Most previous literature shared how speaking to AI can have psychological impacts on humans during this talking phase.

Given the serious interest in making AI your next conversation partner, you might want to think twice before doing that. After all, nothing can be worse than something playing with your emotions and mind, right? These studies seemed to be more linked to figuring out what might happen when speaking to AI chatbots turns into a norm and that day doesn’t seem to be far.

We’re already seeing people taking the chatbot as their video game partner to curb loneliness or their personal assistant to do tasks on their behalf. So slowly and surely, we’re getting there.