Can an AI Chatbot Be Your Friend?

People reported feeling less lonely after interacting with AI chatbots programmed to be empathetic, according to a new study from Wharton’s Stefano Puntoni.

An epidemic of loneliness is sweeping modern societies, taking a collective toll on the physical and emotional health of people who are isolated and without a sense of community. Maybe AI chatbots can help.

A new study co-authored by Wharton marketing professor Stefano Puntoni finds that when people interact with chatbots programmed to respond with empathy, their feelings of loneliness are significantly abated — at least for a short time.

Puntoni said the buzz about what generative artificial intelligence can do for business and productivity has been so big since the release of ChatGPT two years ago that he wanted to explore whether software could also benefit well-being. If chatbots can be programmed to have in-depth conversations on everything from customer service to medical diagnoses, there’s no reason why they can’t keep people company.

“These machines are really good at talking to us. What does that mean for relationships, for empathy, for our well-being?” he said.

Finding a Chatbot Friend

Puntoni spoke to Wharton Business Daily about the study, “AI Companions Reduce Loneliness.” (Listen to the podcast.) The co-authors are Julian De Freitas, business administration professor and director of the Ethical Intelligence Lab at Harvard Business School; Ahmet Kaan Uğuralp of Bilkent University; and Zeliha Uğuralp of Bilkent University.

The scholars designed five experiments to measure interactions between participants and chatbots under different conditions. For some of the experiments, they fine-tuned the system prompts that guide how the chatbot responds to people. When the bot was prompted to be useless, there was no effect on loneliness. When the bot was prompted to be helpful but not empathetic, there was a small decrease in loneliness.

But the biggest effect happened when the bot was programmed to be helpful, empathetic, friendly, and upbeat. After one 15-minute conversation, participants reported feeling significantly less lonely, on par with talking to another human being.

Those positive feelings were replicated in a fourth study, when participants were asked to have 15-minute conversations with the human-like chatbot each day for a week and report their loneliness level.

“I am really enjoying my talks with ‘Jessie,’” one participant reported. “It’s so easy and it feels really amazing to have someone (or something, I guess) listen … and the responses I get are perfect, to be honest.”

Another participant said, “It’s funny. I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel about this, talking every day to the AI about whatever comes to mind for 15 minutes, but now it’s become a rather pleasant routine. I could see where this would really benefit people who were feeling isolated.”

Prescribing AI Chatbots for Loneliness

Puntoni said the results suggest that AI could be part of the prescription for loneliness, which is so acute that U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy compared the risk of premature death from isolation to smoking 15 packs of cigarettes a day.

“People do experience loneliness to an extent that was much larger than in previous times, where people lived in smaller, interconnected communities. Social media interactions are not quite the same as having a cup of coffee with a neighbor,” Puntoni said. “Perhaps these tools can be a useful element of an answer to that question.”

But Puntoni said more research is needed to understand the long-term effect of interacting with human-like AI. It’s possible that prolonged exposure could be harmful if people rely on machines to replace broken social bonds.

“Would these tools start preventing people from seeking connections with real people because they are so comfortable in those [AI] interactions, almost like a sci-fi scenario?” he said.

AI and Self-identity

Puntoni has been studying the effect of automation on self-identity for about a decade, long before ChatGPT and other large language models were widely available. He wants to understand how consumers behave and make decisions differently with automation. He’s also interested in how workers, especially skilled and professional employees, feel and react when parts of their jobs can be done by machines.

Puntoni said his latest paper on AI companionship falls into his broader research focus: maintaining well-being in the digital age.

“We spend a lot of energy trying to understand what people think of AI tools,” he said. “But increasingly, we need also to think about how these AI tools change the way we think about ourselves.”