The IT Industry Wants AI Chatbots To Reduce Loneliness. Experts Are Doubtful

This month, Dr. Vivek Murthy, the Surgeon General of the United States, issued a warning about the loneliness epidemic facing society. Murthy cautioned that loneliness is more than just feeling alone. It may have a negative impact on your mental, physical, and emotional wellbeing. A lonely individual may be more likely to experience dementia, a stroke, depression, or anxiety. Like smoking 15 cigarettes a day, it can even cause a premature death, which is why Murthy is interested in finding a solution from the standpoint of public health.

Given the serious effects of isolation and loneliness, Murthy wrote in the recommendation, “We have an opportunity and a responsibility to make the same investments in addressing social connection that we have made in addressing tobacco use, obesity, and the addiction crisis.” Our individual and societal health and well-being will suffer increasingly if we don’t act in this manner.

While Murthy published an 80-page paper outlining potential solutions, it’s noteworthy — and possibly not a coincidence — that it’s also happening at a time when artificial intelligence (AI) is on people’s minds, in part because ChatGPT, a large language model-style AI chatbot, was released. However, it goes beyond ChatGPT. Recently, Inflection AI unveiled Pi (“personal intelligence”), a chatbot that was intended to serve as a “supportive companion assistant.” Additionally, Snapchat just unveiled My AI Bot, a chatbot designed for regular communication with users. Replika, an AI companion bot, is marketed as “the AI companion who cares.”

Notably, Murthy’s advice did not mention AI companion bots as a potential remedy for the scourge of loneliness. However, tech firms and academic institutions have already made significant investments in it as a remedy, raising the question of whether AI has a place in the fight against America’s loneliness crisis.

Dr. Carla Marie Manly, a clinical psychologist and the author of “Joy From Fear,” said that from a psychological standpoint, AI bots could be able to “relieve temporary loneliness,” but that they would fall short in many ways when compared to the value that a real-life human companion can offer.

No matter how advanced an AI partner may be, Manly emphasised that a bot is not a reliable, devoted human buddy. “Bots probably won’t interact with you in ways that increase your vulnerability, push you, and enable you to create a loving relationship with them,” the author writes.

Manly declared that she would liken an AI companion bot’s function to that of an imaginary friend, who can occasionally play a beneficial part in a person’s life. There are, however, a lot of restrictions.

Human friendships can be challenging, frightful, overpowering, and even unpredictable, yet they can also be incredibly gratifying and life-saving. According to Lydia Denworth, “friendship is an organism that shifts its shape across our lives according to our abilities and our availability — in other words, according to how much we open ourselves to its possibilities.”

Human friendships depend on the contributions of both individuals and need vulnerability and participation from both. Because of this, researchers who study the biochemical causes of loneliness, including Dr. Steve Cole of the University of California, Los Angeles, are sceptical that companion AI bots may help combat loneliness.

Because being recognised and cared about by another person is one of the most important aspects of empathy and compassion for both the giver and the recipient, Cole expressed scepticism that these initiatives will have the desired impact. And with AI, that is essentially impossible. It may be aware, but it doesn’t have the same concern for us as a person would.

Cole continued, “Scientific studies consistently demonstrate that face-to-face interactions are more meaningful than virtual ones.” For instance, during the COVID-19 social distancing era, Cole and his colleagues conducted research on 142 healthy young adults. To test the hypothesis that online social connections could boost antiviral immunity in a manner similar to the effects of in-person social connectedness on blood analysis, researchers examined the participants’ blood samples. Unsurprisingly, the findings refute this theory. “Digitally mediated social relations do not appear to substantially offset the absence of in-person or offline social connection in the context of immune cell gene regulation,” the study’s authors wrote in their conclusion.

Cole referred to reciprocal kindness as the “secret ingredient of why human beings rule the world.” People are a very social species.

It won’t be successful to use technology to solve human loneliness, according to Cat Moore, director of belonging at the University of Southern California. This is because loneliness is not a technological issue in the first place.

“Trying to act like it will solve the problem if we just get our tech good enough and human like enough is a fundamental mistake in the nature of the problem,” Moore added. Therefore, the framework must be what kind of problem loneliness is, and it is at the core of interpersonal human problems involving full human beings that have minds, hearts, bodies, souls, settings, and actually relationships — it has to be treated on all of those layers.

She works with college students who want to form more satisfying social ties; therefore, she cannot picture a scenario in which an AI companion is the answer.

Real relationships are the only thing that works, according to Moore. I have never had a student say, “I’m so lonely,” or “I could really do for a lovely robot right now,” in my office.

According to Moore, the misallocation of funds intended for technical anti-loneliness efforts could prevent individuals from seeking out genuine human connections. One way AI might contribute to the answer, according to Moore, is by encouraging people to connect with actual, living people. An AI bot, for instance, could facilitate the beginning of a conversation with a human for some people who are extremely isolated and unable to engage in simple prosocial actions. One potential disadvantage, though, is that some individuals might begin to feel safer or more at ease with a bot, which might prevent them from reaching their full potential.