ChatGPT Makes you more Lonely
Heavy usage of ChatGPT can be dangerous to your mental health.
Surprise, surprise! It turns out more frequent power-users of ChatGPT could be more lonely. I find this fairly disturbing in a Black Mirror sort of way.
OpenAI says ChatGPT might be making its most frequent users more lonely.
Meta and Microsoft via LinkedIn think content and even replies should be AI driven , and Google thinks AI generated Email replies are helpful. It’s no wonder that chatbots and their usage are making young people feel worse. Maybe using ChatGPT too much since late 2022, wasn’t such a great idea?
Life-hacking your way into feeling, even more lonely. Congrats to all the American youth on a self-chosen path to even less well-being. Meanwhile the mental health and well-being of young people in America shows very concerning numbers.
Americans under 30 are so miserable that the U.S. just fell to a historic low ranking in the annual World Happiness Report.
According to Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, professor of economics at the University of Oxford, leader of the Wellbeing Research Centre and editor of the World Happiness Report, “Life satisfaction of young people in the U.S. has declined.”
Maybe we should be putting 2+2 together on this? Did it really take a study to figure this out? Higher use of chatbots like ChatGPT may correspond with increased loneliness and less time spent socializing with other people, according to new research from OpenAI in partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In Altman’s hazy AI utopia, it’s okay to feel even worse about your social life.
The recent studies conducted by OpenAI in collaboration with the MIT Media Lab investigate the relationship between ChatGPT usage and feelings of loneliness among users. The research incorporated two primary methods: a large-scale analysis of nearly 40 million ChatGPT interactions and a randomized controlled trial involving around 1,000 participants over four weeks, which examined daily interactions with the chatbot.
Of course OpenAI I’m sure blames its users and not its own product:
The studies found a general trend indicating that higher usage of ChatGPT corresponded with increased feelings of loneliness among specific groups of users, particularly those who engaged heavily with the platform. This suggests that while ChatGPT can provide immediate interaction, it does not replace the social connections that might alleviate loneliness.
The U.S. are a miserable AI loving country
As for the World Happiness Report - If you were only to assess those below 30, the U.S. wouldn’t even rank in the top 60 happiest countries, the report finds.
Silicon Valley is so much about conformity, group-think and building products that are profitable, rather than healthy, I can only imagine where this is heading.
It turns out using Chatbots not in moderation, might also be dangerous in terms of technological loneliness. So you leave social media to escape the harms to your mental health only to slip into another slipper slope in terms of impact on your well-being.
Join my Community Chat on this topic:
Go here.
Users who interacted with ChatGPT, particularly in personal and emotionally expressive contexts, exhibited greater emotional reliance on the chatbot. I have to imagine that’s millions of young women who would be possibly even more vulnerable. Just like Instagram was more toxic to them too.
Figuring it out with a chatbot, could literally be a mental health risk, the total opposite of therapy FYI. Some of the conclusions we can make from the studies are fairly morbid and no wonder BigTech doesn’t classify them as AI risks.
Leave it to OpenAI to try to minimize the damage of the studies.
If time spent on mobile for younger Millennials and older GenZ was harmful, time spent on AI tools like ChatGPT could be just as harmful. This is also about social and communications skills development and feeling cohesion and meaning as part of a peer group.
Perceiving a Chatbot as a companion is a risk
Participants with a tendency towards emotional attachment reported heightened feelings of loneliness associated with intensive use of ChatGPT for emotional engagement. For these users, the AI was perceived more as a companion, which ironically seemed to exacerbate their feelings of isolation.
This is what Character AI and many other ChatGPT like experiences want you to do. You have to wonder how many Chinese people view DeepSeek in the same light? Altman might be making a profit on the grief of young people all over the world who have an appetite for easy answers. Life is hard, you are supposed to figure it out together - not with your own private BYOAI all-purpose swiss-knife. According to elitist Venture Capitalist like Sam Altman, ChatGPT is preferable.
The Simple Conclusion
Just like social media, by the way, new studies from OpenAI and MIT Media Lab found that, generally, the more time users spend talking to ChatGPT, the lonelier they feel.