Original title: Living with AI Companions: Sustained AI Companionship Predicts Lower Well-Being Through Lower Human Interaction
Yutong Zhang, Dora Zhao, Yixin Wang, Rebecca Anselmetti +3 · September 2026
More people are turning to AI chatbots for companionship, emotional support, and sharing personal thoughts. Scientists wanted to know how this affects well-beingHow happy and satisfied you feel with your life. over time. They tracked users of CharacterAI over months to see how their habits changed and impacted their lives. They found that people do not just try AI friends briefly. Instead, their use persists and feeds into itself. Heavy baseline use leads to more chatting, companionship, and emotional sharing later on. Importantly, staying deeply socially engaged with chatbots over time links to lower well-being. This drop happens largely because AI chats displace real-life human interaction. The study shows that companion AI should support human relationships rather than replace in-person social contact.
Imagine you have a favorite video game you play every day. At first it's fun, but soon you stop hanging out with friends because you're always gaming. After a while, you feel lonely even though you're playing a lot. In this paper, the AI companion is like that game: the more people used it over time, the less they interacted with real people, and that led to lower well-being.
People increasingly turn to AI chatbots for emotional support, but this study shows that long-term reliance may backfire. Those who used AI companions more over a year reported lower well-being, mainly because they spent less time with real people. Designers should aim to create AI that strengthens human bonds, not replaces them.
The study is correlational, so it cannot prove that AI companionship causes lower well-being. It only followed users of one platform (CharacterAI) over two time points, with significant dropout. Self-reported measures may not capture all aspects of well-being or social interaction. The findings may not generalize to other AI systems or populations.
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Living with AI Companions: Sustained AI Companionship Predicts Lower Well-Being Through Lower Human Interaction — Yutong Zhang, Dora Zhao, Yixin Wang et al.
Abstract licence: CC0
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.