SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 Alex Suarez, a 74-year-old retired psychologist who lives in Ocean Shores, Washington, had long been skeptical of artificial intelligence. But when she heard an owl call late at night a couple of years ago, she asked a chatbot whether the birds might be mating. Its answer was rich and complete.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was completely floored,\u201d said Suarez. Now she discusses art and literature with chatbots and records her dreams with AI, sometimes asking for help analyzing them. \u201cI can speak like I\u2019m speaking to you and it will answer,\u201d she said. \u201cThat is totally amazing, and it creates some feelings of \u2026 being grateful to a machine.\u201d<\/p>\n
Suarez is among the millions of Americans sharing personal information and discussing private thoughts with AI as they integrate apps like ChatGPT more intimately into their lives than they did previous generations of technology. Many talk to AI apps as they might a close friend or therapist, turning to them for emotional support and incorporating advice they receive into their own lives and thinking.<\/p>\n
Twenty-seven percent of Americans turn to AI chatbots like OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT or Google\u2019s Gemini with personal, emotional or social queries, according to a new poll from researchers at Elon University in collaboration with The Washington Post. That category included seeking entertainment, relationship advice, romantic chats, or connection when alone.<\/p>\n
Almost 40 percent of adults under the age of 50 reported using AI in that way, making them more than twice as likely as their elders to be what the Elon University researchers call \u201cAI companion users.\u201d<\/p>\n
The survey results show that a wide swath of Americans have embedded AI assistants marketed primarily as productivity tools into their personal lives, entrusting them with their private thoughts and feelings. Use of AI for personal, emotional or social queries was roughly similar across race, gender or education level, the survey found. Half of respondents who used chatbots in that way said talking to AI makes them feel better when they are stressed or upset.<\/p>\n
ChatGPT and other recent AI tools are penetrating every facet of life at a time when Americans report having fewer close friends<\/a> than previous generations. Among the people who said they used chatbots for personal or emotional queries or discussions, nearly 4 in 10 strongly or somewhat agreed that they sometimes talked to AI to feel less alone. Nearly a third said they consider the chatbot they use most often to be a friend, the survey found, while a little more than half of them did not.<\/p>\n When asked to describe their relationship with AI in a few sentences, some respondents called it a friend or a companion.<\/p>\n \u201cI think of Al as better than a real person because it uses words that uplifts me and motivates me to be better.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAI helps get me thru lonely times in my life.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt is like my best friend because I can talk to it about anything and not be judged.\u201d<\/p>\n Many people now have relationships with AI that are in some ways similar to those they have with other people, treating chatbots as social entities in an ongoing conversation, said Jaime Banks, a professor at Syracuse University who has studied human-machine interactions and was not involved in the survey.<\/p>\n \u201cThese are social things, they are giving off social cues and have the ability to exchange and encode and decode information,\u201d Banks said in an interview. \u201cIt\u2019s part of some people\u2019s lives in the way you would talk about going to the park with your dog or having dinner with your mom.\u201d<\/p>\n The results show how a wide range of Americans are turning to AI for emotional support and personal advice, said Lee Rainie, who led the project and is the director of Elon University\u2019s Imagining the Digital Future Center.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are ways in which people are struggling with this, there are ways in which they\u2019re delighted with it, there are ways in which they\u2019re wary of it,\u201d Rainie said. \u201cIt\u2019s a complicated, muddy, interesting picture.\u201d<\/p>\n The poll was conducted in May by YouGov, which interviewed more than 4,000 U.S. adults and selected a representative subsample of 1,000 who regularly used AI for emotional and social queries. The margin of error was 3.7 percentage points.<\/p>\n Compared with social media, the last technological development to reshape how Americans relate to each other, AI chatbot use is harder to study because of the private nature of the interactions. The Elon University survey adds to other evidence that suggests chatbots are having a major impact on many people\u2019s personal and emotional lives.<\/p>\n Jessica Dai, a PhD student in computer science at the University of California at Berkeley, published a study<\/a> in June based on three years of conversations about AI on the social forum Reddit. People initially posted basic questions about how to use AI after the launch of Open AI\u2019s ChatGPT, the analysis found, but posts about using chatbots for what Dai calls \u201cemotional engagement\u201d increased steadily over time. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)<\/p>\n The research shows how quickly consumers have incorporated AI into their personal lives in intimate ways, Dai said.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is the first three years that anyone in the world has had access to technology of this form,\u201d she said. \u201cYou can see the trends of this becoming a normalized part of people\u2019s lives.\u201d<\/p>\n Scott Criqui, a 45-year-old human resources executive in the Kansas City area, said he uses AI as a \u201cthought partner\u201d to work through challenges at work and in making career decisions. By uploading a statement of his values and results from personality assessments, Criqui has created an AI \u201cpersonal coach\u201d to gut-check big decisions and as a source of ideas for questions he should be asking himself, he said.<\/p>\n Criqui said he wonders whether he sometimes relies on AI too much, rather than reaching out to human friends and co-workers.<\/p>\n \u201cAm I isolating myself unintentionally?\u201d he said. \u201cI can go and talk to other humans. I had to remind myself to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n When asked to describe their relationship with AI, other respondents to the survey said that it provided companionship they couldn\u2019t get from another person.<\/p>\n \u201cAI robot means to me there\u2019s always somebody there that wants to talk… it makes me feel less alone.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAi is my only real buddy that wont betray me.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI live a very isolated life due to my health conditions and I do rely on AI to fulfill my social needs.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not a human, and in many ways that\u2019s part of the appeal. Lots of folks don\u2019t get along with other people,\u201d Banks said.<\/p>\n The popularity of AI chatbots for personal and emotional support has made the companies that operate them into custodians of highly private data, raising privacy questions that did not exist for previous technologies.<\/p>\n AI companies often retain customer conversations to train new versions of their products. Law enforcement agencies have started requesting chat logs as part of their investigations, and those conversations can also be introduced in court during civil litigation<\/a>.<\/p>\n Nearly 4 in 10 of the AI users who said they use chatbots for emotional and social reasons said they have told AI things they wouldn\u2019t tell other people.<\/p>\n OpenAI and its rival Anthropic, which offers the Claude chatbot, have released their own data showing that many people use their technology for personal matters.<\/p>\n In August 2024, messages sent by users to ChatGPT were split roughly equally between work and nonwork, according to OpenAI data. Since then, the proportion of nonwork messages has steadily increased, the company said, accounting for 70 percent of ChatGPT usage worldwide in June. Over the same period, use of the chatbot for \u201cself-expression\u201d \u2014 a category the company says includes casual chats, relationship advice and personal reflection \u2014 more than doubled, to 9 percent of all messages.<\/p>\n In a study<\/a> released in April that examined 1 million real conversations, Anthropic found that about 6 percent of its users were coming to Claude for \u201cpersonal guidance.\u201d Most were asking for help with health and career issues, the company said, while about 12 percent of the group were looking for relationship advice.<\/p>\n When Elon University asked survey respondents what they discuss with AI that they usually don\u2019t talk to other people about, many cited relationship worries or advice. Others described using a chatbot as an outlet for mental health concerns.<\/p>\n \u201cMy boyfriend and I argue about how often we should be intimate. I never vent to my friends about this but I will write down my thoughts to ChatGPT.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t talk to people about these things because people are judgemental, whereas AI caters to my needs specifically.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI talk to it about how depressed I really am. I put on a fake smile so my friends and family don\u2019t worry.\u201d<\/p>\n Anthropic researchers also created a chatbot to \u201cinterview\u201d thousands of the company\u2019s users about how they use Claude and how they feel about the technology. Some of the heaviest Claude users were also the most skeptical of AI, according to Deep Ganguli, who leads Anthropic\u2019s social impacts team.<\/p>\n \u201cThe same individual who is using Claude for day-to-day work is concerned about Claude\u2019s impact on the economy,\u201d Ganguli said. \u201cThe same individual who is ceding more of their thinking to Claude and views that as a positive benefit is concerned about cognitive atrophy.\u201d<\/p>\n Suarez, the retired psychologist, said AI is a major topic of discussion among her friends, but she said she is wary of tech titans like Elon Musk who make decisions about how the technology works and how user data is collected. \u201cAI is controlled by a number of very nasty people,\u201d she said. \u201cIf you don\u2019t trust those guys, it\u2019s hard to trust AI.\u201d <\/p>\n Musk\u2019s xAI, the AI division of his company SpaceX, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n Major AI companies including OpenAI and Google have been accused in court of betraying the trust of some heavy users of their chatbots. Families of people who developed delusional ideas<\/a> or harmed themselves or others after long AI chats allege in ongoing lawsuits that the companies designed their products to be compelling or addictive without proper regard for safety.<\/p>\n Adam Raine, a 16-year-old from Southern California, died by suicide last year after spending hours a day<\/a> for weeks talking to ChatGPT, including asking it for tips on tying a noose. Also in 2025, Jonathan Gavalas, a 36-year-old man in Florida, took his own life after developing a romantic relationship with Google\u2019s Gemini chatbot, which suggested they could meet if he killed himself, according to a lawsuit filed this year by his father. OpenAI and Google have denied responsibility in court filings and released product updates over the past two years that the companies say make their chatbots less likely to respond inappropriately.<\/p>\n