Julian De Freitas

And...

At the time, I would describe it as kind of like magic.

I just found myself really enjoying the conversation and not wanting it to end.

So as the sort of timer was about to run out, I found myself sending more messages on multiple days.

I found myself looking forward to the next day's interaction.

I felt that after the interaction, I did feel...

better than I did before.

Yeah, I did.

And basically at that point, I knew, you know, we were onto something and that this technology had the potential to alleviate loneliness.

And what we found is after interacting with the chatbot, we saw that they said that they felt less lonely than they did before interacting with it.

Yeah, it did.

This idea of feeling heard is that someone, or I guess in this case something, is really understanding you and empathizing with you and truly attending to what you're saying, that's responding in a personalized way.

Yeah, so this is a sort of

in some ways, perplexing phenomenon because it suggests that it's more an illusion that's happening, as if there are certain social receptors that are being tickled by these interactions.

And that's enough for you to get the benefits, even if

that conversation is not based in reality.

I sometimes describe this a little like when you look at one of those visual illusions where it seems like there's motion on the page and someone tells you, actually, there's no motion at all.

It's all just a big magic trick.

And even though you know it's a magic trick, you still can't help but see motion on the page.

Probably the reason that that happened is that these apps were not trained to deal with those kinds of messages.