AI Companions Reduce Loneliness

Understand

Chatbots are now able to engage in sophisticated conversations with consumers in the domain of relationships, providing a potential coping solution to widescale societal loneliness.

• Behavioral research provides little insight into whether these applications are effective at alleviating loneliness.
• We address this question by focusing on AI companions applications designed to provide consumers with synthetic interaction partners.
• Studies 1 and 2 find suggestive evidence that consumers use AI companions to alleviate loneliness, by employing a novel methodology for fine tuning large language models to detect loneliness in conversations and reviews.