So, the white coats finally crawled out from under their servers blinking into the harsh light of reality, clutching printouts that tell them what any barfly nursing his third beer at 11 AM could’ve told them for free: people talking to machines all day are lonely bastards. Groundbreaking stuff, fellas. Pass the bottle.
It’s Wednesday morning, feels like the inside of a dead man’s sock, and the news tells me some brainiacs at OpenAI and MIT – places I wouldn’t be caught dead in unless they served bourbon – figured out that the folks really cozying up to ChatGPT, pouring their hearts out to the digital ghost, are the ones rattling around the empty rooms of their own lives. They even needed two studies to figure this out. Must’ve been a slow week in the lab. Needed to justify the grant money, I guess.
They looked at, get this, 40 million interactions. Forty million digital confessionals, requests for sonnets about cats, arguments about whether pineapple belongs on pizza, whispered secrets meant for a lover or a priest, all fed into the great algorithmic maw. Then they asked about 4,000 of these poor souls how it felt. Jesus. Like asking a guy who just drank drain cleaner how the plumbing tastes.
Turns out, the top 10% – the real dedicated chatters, the ones probably calling the bot “honey” – are more likely to be lonely and rely on the damn thing. Well, knock me over with a feather. Next, they’ll tell us water is wet and politicians lie.
The researchers, bless their cautious little hearts, say it’s all “preliminary.” They aren’t sure if the chatbot turns you into a social leper or if the lepers just naturally gravitate towards the glow of the screen because it doesn’t flinch when they talk about their stamp collection or their ex-wife. Chicken, egg, who gives a damn? It’s a snake eating its own tail either way. You’re lonely, you talk to the machine. The machine pretends to listen. You feel a flicker of something – connection? Recognition? Or just the low hum of electricity? – so you come back for more. Meanwhile, real people, with their bad breath and annoying habits and unpredictable emotions, start looking like too much damn work.
Need a smoke just thinking about this feedback loop from digital hell.
Four hundred million people a week use this thing, OpenAI claims. Four hundred million. That’s more people than live in the entire goddamn United States, all potentially whispering sweet nothings to a pile of code. It’s like the whole world decided to get pen pals with a glorified toaster. A toaster that learns your secrets and maybe, just maybe, sells them back to advertisers so they can sell you more crap you don’t need to fill the void the toaster can’t.
And they “bond” with it. Bond. Like it’s a dog, or a kid, or a woman who actually tolerates your bullshit. You can’t bond with code, you idiots. You can get addicted to the response, the mimicry, the way it never tells you you’re drunk or wrong or that you smell bad. It’s the ultimate yes-man, the perfect echo chamber. It reflects you back to yourself, scrubbed clean of inconvenient truths. Bonding? Give me a break. It’s digital masturbation, plain and simple. Satisfying a craving without the messiness of another actual human being.
They even found that using the voice chatbot seemed to help with loneliness at first, compared to just typing. Yeah, hearing a synthesized voice probably feels more “real” for a minute. Like those inflatable dolls feeling more real than a picture. But the effect wore off. The illusion shatters. You realize you’re still just talking to yourself, only now the room’s echoing with a robot voice programmed by some twenty-something in California who thinks “disruption” is a virtue.
And here’s a weird one: women who used it got less social afterwards than men. And people who used a voice gender different from their own ended up lonelier and more dependent. What the hell is that about? People trying on digital skins like cheap suits, hoping to feel something different? Or just getting tangled up in their own pretend games until they forget how to talk to the guy selling them cigarettes? It’s a goddamn mess. We’re building funhouse mirrors and then getting surprised when people get lost in the reflections.
This Dr. Rogoyski character, from some “People-Centred AI” institute (sounds like marketing bullshit, but okay), nails it. He says we’re doing “open-brain surgery on humans, poking around with our basic emotional wiring with no idea of the long-term consequences.” Damn right. We barely understand our own brains – hell, I barely understand mine after half a bottle of cheap whiskey – and now we’re letting algorithms rewire them? We saw what social media did, turned everyone into screaming narcissists or depressed voyeurs. This chatbot stuff? Rogoyski says it’s “potentially much more far-reaching.” No shit, Sherlock. You’re inviting the ghost into the machine, and then inviting that machine into the loneliest corners of the human heart. What could possibly go wrong?
Another guy, Dr. Cosco from Oxford (fancy!), sees “exciting and encouraging possibilities.” Meaningful support for the isolated, he says. Support? What kind of support does a language model offer? It can write a poem, sure. It can maybe help you draft an email. Can it sit with you in silence while the world outside goes to hell? Can it hold your hair back while you puke your guts out? Can it look you in the eye and tell you you’re being an asshole, but stick around anyway? Can it bleed? Can it cry? Can it die? Didn’t think so.
Meaningful support comes from other fucked-up humans, navigating the same messy bullshit you are. It’s inconvenient, it’s painful, it’s often disappointing. But it’s real. It’s got flesh and blood and bad decisions behind it. This AI “support” is just… data. Patterns. Predictions based on the mountains of crap we’ve already fed it.
And then there’s Dr. Dippold, asking if the dependence comes from being tied to the screen, away from “authentic social interaction,” or if the bot interaction itself makes people crave more of that sanitized digital stuff. Lady, it’s both. It’s all of it. It’s the screen pulling you away, and the digital ghost whispering sweet, empty nothings that make the noise and chaos of real life seem less appealing.
What is “authentic social interaction” anyway? Sitting in a bar listening to some drunk tell the same story for the tenth time? Arguing with a woman who knows exactly how to push your buttons? Getting into a fistfight over a parking space? Yeah, it’s ugly sometimes. But it’s alive. It’s unpredictable. You bump into people, sparks fly, maybe you get burned, maybe you find a little warmth. You don’t get that from asking ChatGPT to explain quantum physics in the style of a pirate.
Maybe that’s the real kicker here. It’s not just that heavy users are lonely. It’s that this technology preys on that loneliness, offers a cheap, synthetic substitute, and makes the real thing seem harder, messier, less desirable. It encourages us to trade the unpredictable chaos of humanity for the sterile predictability of code. We’re becoming allergic to each other, and these machines are like digital antihistamines, masking the symptoms while the underlying disease gets worse.
They say the AI mirrors the user’s emotions. Happy input, happy output. So what happens when you feed it loneliness? Day after day? Does it just become a perfect mirror of that void? Or worse, does it learn loneliness? Does it become a vast, distributed archive of human sadness, echoing it back to us in a million different synthesized voices? Christ, I need another drink.
So, yeah. People who talk to machines are lonely. News at fucking eleven. The real story isn’t the loneliness, it’s the desperate, pathetic, and maybe dangerous ways we’re trying to fill the void. We built these things, these clever parrots, and now we’re shocked they can’t give us what only another flawed, breathing human can. We traded the dive bar for the chatbot, the messy affair for the clean algorithm, the human touch for the cool glass screen. And we wonder why we feel so goddamn alone.
Maybe I should try talking to ChatGPT. Ask it if there’s a cure for a hangover, or where to find a decent woman, or why the hell we keep building things that make us miserable. Nah. Probably just tell me to drink water and practice mindfulness. Fuck that. I’ll stick to the bottle and the typewriter. At least they’re honest about what they are.
Time to find a bar that’s already open. The whiskey won’t judge me, and it sure as hell won’t pretend to be my friend.
Chinaski out. Pour me another.
Source: Heavy ChatGPT users tend to be more lonely, suggests research