For example, in January, the co-founder of one A.I. company argued that the technology could improve quality of life for isolated older people, writing, “Companionship can be provided in the form of virtual assistants or chatbots, and these companions can engage in conversations, play games or provide information, helping to alleviate feelings of loneliness and boredom.”
Certainly, there are valuable and beneficial uses for A.I. chatbots — they can be life-changing for people who are visually impaired, for example. But the notion that bots will one day be an adequate substitute for human contact misunderstands what loneliness really is, and doesn’t account for the necessity of human touch.
There are disagreements among academics about the precise meaning of “loneliness,” but to come at it as a social problem, it’s worth trying to sharpen our definitions. Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at New York University and the author of several books about social connectedness, including “Going Solo” and “Palaces for the People,” described the complexity of loneliness to me this way: “I think of loneliness as our bodies’ signal to us that we need better, more satisfying connections with other people.” And, he said, “the major issue I have with loneliness metrics is they often fail to distinguish between the ordinary healthy loneliness, which gets us off our couch and into the social world when we need it, and the chronic dangerous loneliness, which prevents us from getting off our couch, and spirals and leads us to spiral into depression and withdrawal.”
Why I worry about chatting with bots as a potential solution to loneliness is that it could be an approach that blunts the feeling just enough that it discourages or even prevents people from taking that step off the couch toward making connections with others. And some research indicates that a lack of human touch can exacerbate feelings of isolation. One 2023 paper by researchers at the University of Stirling expresses this more holistic view of loneliness quite eloquently, describing the emotion as “an embodied and contextualized sensory experience.”
Nick Gray, a co-author of that paper — which is about the effect of simulated versus real touch on feelings of loneliness — told me that he hasn’t seen any research yet on how realistic A.I. chatbots affect loneliness, noting that it is, obviously, a very new technology. But based on previous research in the field, including his own, he says “a realistic A.I. chatbot could give a temporary reprieve of the feelings of loneliness,” but “it’s a stretch to say it will reduce or get rid of loneliness.”
