Lonely? Chat With a Person, Not a Bot
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The show that asks the questions other shows are afraid to ask. The Last Show with David Cooper. Are you feeling lonely? Well, these days you could turn to an AI chatbot for things like emotional support. You could vent to it. You could confess to it. You could bond with it. And it might feel like a friend, but can a robot actually replace a real human connection? Or does talking to your perfect friend just end up making you feel lonelier? Well, that's what we're going to discuss here with psychology researcher at the University of British Columbia, Ronnie Lee, who's done study on things like this. Ronnie, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. I don't think there's any stopping this, whether we like the sound of it or not.
People chatting with, you know, large language models, chat GPT tools like this to sort of replace friendship, to replace human interaction. What made you curious whether a chatbot is a good replacement for a human companion?
Well, we have all been this in the situation, right?
Can AI chatbots effectively replace human companionship?
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.
At least on its surface. I mean, I've heard about things like AI sycophancy, which is a fancy way of saying AIs that validate you a little too much might not be good for you. But let's talk about your research. You created a chatbot named Sam to be someone's ideal friend. What did you end up testing? What did Sam actually end up doing with some of your participants?
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.
And did the chatbot show things like empathy and appearing to care? Did it act like the perfect friend? Before we get to whether it felt like the perfect friend to the people you spoke to.
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. So it seems like super empathetic and people like it.
Yeah, Isabel. I have the same problems with her, actually. Okay, so the chatbot was able to mimic this supportive side of the conversation to the woman on the other end who's complaining about Isabel to the people that are using it as a friend. Did they feel less lonely? What did they report feeling after these interactions?
Well, yeah, the results actually surprised us, right? When you're feeling like AI is so good at comforting us, but actually what we found is it didn't help people feel less lonely over time.
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