Is ‘bonding’ with ChatGPT actually making people lonelier?

Since it launched in 2022, ChatGPT has become a significant presence in many people’s lives. Students use it to study and “help out” with their assignments. Others use it to outsource mundane tasks like writing a shopping list or planning their workouts (despite the as-yet-unverified environmental costs). And another significant chunk of the population use it as their personal therapist, sharing intimate details of their lives in return for advice or simply as a tool for guided self-reflection.

Given the chatbot’s “increasingly humanlike” speech and 24/7 availability, it doesn’t come as much of a surprise that a small subset of these users – typically the 10 per cent who’ve used it most – have emotionally “bonded” with ChatGPT. This news comes courtesy of new studies from OpenAI and MIT Media Lab, spanning thousands of users and millions of interactions.

What does this actually mean for ChatGPT’s most dedicated users? To be honest, the news isn’t great. According to the MIT study, higher daily usage of ChatGPT “correlated with higher loneliness, dependence, and problematic use, and lower socialization”. Stronger emotional attachment and higher trust in the chatbot also appears to correlate with “greater loneliness and emotional dependence”, the researchers say. Notably, participants who set the chatbot’s voice mode to the opposite gender reported significantly higher levels of loneliness and emotional dependence.

The MIT study took place across four weeks, studying hundreds of thousands of messages sent by almost 1,000 users. The OpenAI study, meanwhile, surveyed more than 4,000 users on their perception of ChatGPT, as well as analysing over 4 million conversations “in a privacy-preserving manner”. This also revealed that very high usage is linked to higher levels of self-reported dependence.

Unsurprisingly, OpenAI also concludes that dependence is strongly influenced by a user’s initial emotional state, as well as the duration of their usage. The exact effects of voice-based interactions are also “highly nuanced”, it says. In fact, the MIT researchers suggest that using the chatbot’s voice-based mode appears beneficial in reducing loneliness and dependence at first, when compared with just typing in a chat box. However, these advantages tend to disappear at high usage levels, where effects seem pretty negative across the board.

What can you take a way from all this if you’ve been turning to ChatGPT for emotional support? Well, you might want to reign in your usage a bit. It’s also worth noting that the topic of conversation matters: discussing personal topics generally led to slightly higher levels of loneliness, for example. On the plus side, they were also associated with lower levels of dependence in the long run.

Needless to say, both studies stress that more research needs to be done to fully understand the emotional impact of this emerging technology. Should we have done that before rolling it out to hundreds of millions of people, to use every day of their lives? Nah, it’ll probably be fine!