Ruo-Ning (Ronnie) Li

Well, we have all been this in the situation, right?

Late night and you're kind of feeling a little bit lonely and you are talking to your chatbot and they're super validating.

They're kind of like, you know, chatting with you, give you some advice, for example, and we were feeling bad.

they're always listening, they never fall asleep at 10 p.m., you know, and they are not like responding to your messages two days later, right?

They're super patient and they never kind of like stop talking to you or fall asleep when you're repeatedly talking about your ex, relationship problems.

So it feels like AI can be the ultimate perfect friend we all wanted.

Yeah, so kind of like we get this idea from like when you're chatting with AI, they feel like super supportive and they think like maybe this is a good tool of scalable, obviously, to help cure loneliness, which is a serious problem nowadays, right?

A lot of people are feeling lonely and we can maybe test if AI can be as effective, at least as a human being, to help you reduce loneliness.

So yeah, that's where we started to kind of build this tool.

What if like a highly supportive AI chatbot talking to you would help you?

So we basically pour all our knowledge we learned from relationship science to this chatbot and, you know, to be super validating and very patient and always be there for you.

And we wanted to see like whether this ultimate supportive chatbot can beat human beings.

Yeah, for sure.

We actually look into the conversations participants are having with the AI chatbot, and they're super engaging.

Our participants talk to the AI chatbot with all sorts of other problems, and the AI turns out to be highly supportive.

For example, I can give you a fun chat when a participant actually went to the AI saying like,

You know, one of her friends, Isabel, I don't know who she is, is a bitch.

She's a fat liar, super mean to her.

And the head shop responded, oh, maybe it's time to take a step back.

And, you know, like Leon, some supportive friends and things like that.