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 (LLMs) to detect loneliness in conversations and reviews.
Study 3 finds that AI companions successfully alleviate loneliness on par only with interacting
with another person, and more than other activities such watching YouTube videos. Moreover,
consumers underestimate the degree to which AI companions improve their loneliness. Study 4
uses a longitudinal design and finds that an AI companion consistently reduces loneliness over
the course of a week. Study 5 provides evidence that both the chatbots’ performance and,
especially, whether it makes users feel heard, explain reductions in loneliness. Study 6 provides
an additional robustness check for the loneliness-alleviating benefits of AI companions.
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