AI chatbots may ease the world’s loneliness (if they don’t make it worse)

In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released an advisory about a new public health crisis: the loneliness epidemic. According to Murthy, people of every age and background across the country told him they have grown disconnected from others. Given the harms associated with chronic loneliness — both emotional and physical — the Surgeon General put forth a national strategy to combat the problem.

As if on cue, that same year saw the release of GPT-4, the fourth of OpenAI’s generative AI models. Its capabilities were unlike any previous chatbot, and conversing with it often felt like chatting up a real person. Its popularity prompted a gold rush of interest in chatbots powered by similar large language models.

Now, I’m on record questioning whether framing loneliness as an “epidemic” is wise. I won’t rehash those arguments here other than to say that it’s debatable whether our struggles with loneliness today are exponentially worse than those of past generations. Even so, there are undoubtedly many people out there in need of deeper human connections. AI chatbots may provide a social tool that, while no magic bullet, may relieve loneliness at scale. And researchers have begun looking into it.

In a paper published in Science & Society last year, psychologists Michael Inzlicht, Daryl Cameron, Jason D’Cruz, and Paul Bloom considered the implications of “empathic AI.” Their investigation led them to conclude that AI may have certain advantages when roleplaying as our friends, therapists, mentors, and, as we’ll see, even romantic partners. They also point to several potential risks.

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