Lonely young people are likely better off texting a random stranger than talking to a chatbot, according to a new study.Researchers from the University of British Columbia found that first-semester college students who texted a randomly selected fellow first-semester college student every day for two weeks experienced around a nine percent reduction in feelings of loneliness. The same two weeks of daily messaging with a Discord chatbot reduced loneliness by around two percent, which turned out to be the same amount as daily one-sentence journaling.The research included 300 first-semester college students who were either randomly paired with another student, given a daily solo writing task, or put into a Discord server with a chatbot running on ChatGPT-4o mini.\u00a0The students were instructed to have at least one interaction per day in each of the groups. The human-human pairs were instructed to message each other however they wanted, while the researchers instructed the bot to \u201clisten actively and show empathy,\u201d and to be a \u201cfriendly, positive, and supportive AI friend to help the student navigate their new college experience.\u201d The human participants ultimately acted pretty similarly in both types of chat, sending between eight and 10 messages a day in both their human text chains and their Discord conversations with the large language model (LLM).However, participants who were paired with a human partner reported significantly lower loneliness after the study, and those paired with the chatbot did not. \u201cThis is just such a low tech, simple intervention, and can make people feel significantly less lonely,\u201d Ruo-Ning Li, PhD candidate at UCB and one of the authors of the paper, told 404 Media.\u00a0The research looked at college students specifically, to try to understand whether LLMs could be a scalable tool to help with the isolation that people can feel when going through a big change. The transition to college can be overwhelming: new classmates, new places, new rules. Young people are often away from parents or familiar structure for the first time, building out their new social networks among others who are doing the same. This is a particularly vulnerable time: if chatbots could really cure loneliness for a group of people like this, \u201cthen it would be great,\u201d said Li. But only human to human interaction, despite it being with a random person over text, had any significant effect.\u00a0The research is part of a movement to understand the effects of LLM interactions over periods of time. Another paper from the same lab, published this week in Psychological Science, looks at the experiences of more than 2,000 people over twelve months, checking in with them once a quarter. The study found that higher reported chatbot use was linked with higher loneliness later on \u2014 and vice versa. \u201cChanges in chatbot use have a small effect on emotional isolation in the future. And emotional isolation has a similarly sized effect on your likelihood to use chatbots in the future,\u201d Dr. Dunigan Folk, one of the study\u2019s authors, told 404 Media. He cautioned against calling it a \u201cspiral\u201d, since other things could be changing in peoples\u2019 lives to make them use chatbots and be lonelier. But, he said \u201cit\u2019s suggestive of a negative feedback loop because it\u2019s a reciprocal relationship.\u201d Chatbots, he said, could be something like \u201csocial junk food.\u201d They might make people feel good in the moment, \u201cbut over time, they might not nourish us the same way that human relationships do.\u201dHe said this finding would be consistent with people replacing human relationships with LLMs. \u201cI think it\u2019s a trade-off thing where you talk to AI instead of a person,\u201d Folk said. \u201cthe person would have been a lot more rewarding.\u201dAnd there is evidence to show that AI does have some short-term effects on mood. \u201cIf you measure their feeling of loneliness or social connection right after the interaction, people do feel better,\u201d said Li. However, she added, \u201cmaking people feel momentarily happy is not that hard.\u201d It is not clear that a single positive experience is scalable or persistent longer term. \u201cWe eat candy, we feel happy. But if we eat a lot of candy over a long time, it could be harmful for our health,\u201d Li said.\u00a0That positive short term effect is often reflected in public reports of chatbot usage. For example, two weeks ago, the Guardian published a column where a reporter trialled using an LLM as a therapist, described their validating interaction with it, and concluded that the \u201cexperience of being therapised by a chatbot has been wonderful.\u201d While this isn\u2019t necessarily a robust study design, there is empirical research that \u201cone-shot\u201d interactions with bots do make people feel better in the short term.\u00a0However, human interactions also have positive effects that chatbot use could be distracting people from. Li considers it important to consider the side effects of chatbot interactions, including their potential for replacing the incentive to seek out the positive effects of human connection. \u201cAI can help mitigate negative feelings, but obviously, it cannot replace humans to build connections,\u201d she said. \u201cThat shouldn\u2019t be the goal of the AI design.\u201dA four-week March 2025 study from the MIT Media Lab and OpenAI explored how different types of LLM interaction and conversation impacted users\u2019 mental wellbeing. The paper found that while some instances of chatbot use \u201cinitially appeared beneficial in mitigating loneliness,\u201d higher daily LLM usage was associated with \u201chigher loneliness, dependence, and problematic use, and lower socialization.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"