Rose Rimler

But it was better than watching YouTube, which didn't make a difference.

Oh, right.

Do people think YouTube makes you less lonely?

Like, is it because you're watching a person?

Whether or not people think it makes you less lonely, surveys do find that people do turn to stuff like YouTube when they feel lonely.

YouTube, social media, podcasts.

Oh, no.

Could chatbots be coming for us too, Rose?

Okay.

So that means the AI robot rando was just as good as another rando on the internet that was human.

Yeah.

And Julian and his colleagues, they also wanted to look under the hood here a little bit.

So like, what was it about the bot that helped people feel less lonely?

So they also asked participants questions about how competent the bot seemed and also how empathetic it seemed.

Questions like, did it feel like the bot could put itself in their shoes?

And so when they put all this together, they found that the empathy part made the biggest difference for people's loneliness.

And Julian interprets that to mean that this works because the chatbot makes people feel heard.

Don't you need a human being to feel heard?

So he's kind of like, even though you know you're not talking to a human, if its responses are human enough and if it makes you feel like it's really listening and sort of understanding and internalizing the things that you're saying, like that can be helpful to people.

Yeah.