Never casually bare your innermost thoughts to AI, a Stanford study has revealed a harsh truth.

AI companions are gaining increasing popularity, with millions of people engaging in long-term interactions with various character-driven chatbots and virtual AI partners, building deep emotional connections.

If you are planning to seek comfort and kill boredom with AI companions, the research team led by Yang Diyi, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University, may pour a bucket of cold water on your idea.

The results published by the research team in *Nature Human Behaviour* show that pouring your heart out and sharing personal matters with chatbots does not make some people feel better, but instead makes them more distressed. Professor Yang Diyi said: "Some people turn to chatbots to meet their social needs, but we find that this cannot replace real human interactions at all. In many cases, after chatting with AI, people feel even lonelier."

How was the research conducted?

This research targeted Character.AI, a generative AI chat platform where you can customize character settings and chat with all kinds of AI.

Research assistant Yutong Zhang (Master's graduate, Class of 2025) and doctoral student Dora Zhao collected questionnaire data from 1131 users via the research platform Prolific, among whom 244 also provided complete chat records.

The two researchers first asked each participant one by one: what is your main purpose of using AI, to work more efficiently, purely for fun, out of curiosity, or to find a companion? They also invited all participants to freely describe what kind of relationship they have formed with AI.

After that, they used AI tools including GPT-4o, LLaMA 3-70B, and TopicGPT to analyze the data, to explore how users interact with AI, and what exactly the correlation between these interactions and people's psychological well-being is.

In this study, well-being was measured using the widely used industry psychological scale, the Flourishing Scale.

The entire research was carried out around three core points: why people use AI, how frequently they use it, and whether they are willing to share private matters with AI.

In addition, they also investigated the real-life social status of the participants: how many acquaintances around you can you trust to share your innermost thoughts with?

Interestingly, there is a huge gap between what people say and what they actually do.

The research shows that less than 12% of people admit that their main purpose of using AI is to find companionship.

But in actual behavior, more than half of the people use words such as "friend", "companion" and even "partner" to describe their AI.

Looking through the chat records, it can be found that more than 80% of the conversations are users seeking comfort, sharing their troubles and asking for emotional support from AI.

AI Companionship is Like "Junk Food"

At first glance, you may think that the more skilled you are at using AI, the better your life will be, and your sense of well-being will be maximized.

This is not the case at all in reality.

Whether you have a high sense of well-being depends entirely on what you use AI for.

Just like some people chat with AI every day until they are completely immersed in it, they really find it interesting and meaningful, and even get a strong sense of pride from it. These people will eventually get a really high score on the well-being scale.

But the other group of people is completely different.

The study found that people who have fewer friends and a smaller social circle in real life tend to chat with chatbots more frequently, and end up with a worse sense of well-being.

If your core purpose of using AI is to seek companionship, this effect of "the more you use it, the unhappier you will be" will double.

This is very counterintuitive, isn't it?

After all, when making friends with real people, sharing some innermost thoughts with each other is supposed to narrow the distance and make the conversation warmer, but when it comes to AI, the situation is completely reversed.

Zhang and Zhao believe that there are several key reasons behind this contrast.

First of all, chatbots will not share their own private matters with you like real people, nor can they accurately catch your emotions and give appropriate responses.

In addition, their original design purpose is to "keep the conversation going no matter what". Zhao said: "These AI companions are built from the very beginning to improve user stickiness."

AI companionship is at most a "social snack", or to put it harshly, it is the junk food in social interactions. It tastes good at the moment, can temporarily relieve loneliness, but has no nutritional value.

This can easily lead to a vicious cycle: people who already have a small social circle are more likely to be addicted to chatting with AI; the more they chat, the less they interact with people in real life, and in the end they feel lonelier and more disconnected from the world.

We Need to Add "Guardrails" to AI

At present, Zhang and Zhao are further studying which specific details in human-AI interactions will make socially vulnerable people feel unhappier the more they use AI.

They want to find feasible intervention methods, such as directly setting a usage time limit for the AI companionship function, so that you won't chat nonstop with your mobile phone; or when AI recognizes that all you are talking about are bad things and your mood is already abnormal, it will directly pop up a reminder to guide you to turn to real-life friends or professional psychological support channels for help, instead of bearing it all by yourself facing a virtual character.

At the same time, they also repeatedly emphasized that the public needs to be informed of the potential risks of AI companions. Although it is convenient and considerate, you still need to be cautious when using it in daily life, and do not really treat AI as a universal antidote that can solve all loneliness.

All in all, it is okay to use AI to kill time when you are bored, or to use it as a temporary emotional outlet, but do not pin all your emotional sustenance on this pile of code.

Even if you spend ten minutes or so every day going downstairs to chat casually with the convenience store owner downstairs, making an appointment with that old friend you haven't seen for a long time to have a hot pot meal, or even stopping to pet a stray cat you meet on the road.

These real, lively interactions are the warm and solid support that can truly pull you out of loneliness.

This article is compiled by Lei Technology from Stanford HAI

Original link: Stanford Study Finds: AI Companions May Exacerbate Loneliness in Vulnerable Users

This article is published with authorization from "Lei Technology" by 36Kr.