A 2023 study finds AI friendship apps both ease and feed loneliness

The design

'One is the loneliest number... Two can be as bad as one: The influence of AI Friendship Apps on users' well-being and addiction,' by Hannah R. Marriott (Cardiff Business School) and Valentina Pitardi (Surrey Business School), was published in Psychology & Marketing on 18 September 2023. The paper reports two studies: a netnographic analysis of the r/Replika Reddit community followed by 21 semi-structured follow-up interviews, then a cross-sectional online survey of 572 usable U.S. adult respondents recruited through Prolific, screened for age 18 or over, U.S. location and prior AI-friendship-app use. Of those respondents, 220 (38.5%) reported using Replika, made by Luka, Inc.; others reported using Kuki, Anima, Woebot or Wysa.

What the evidence says

Interview participants described their AI friend as accepting them 'without judgment' and said this reduced loneliness precisely because the app could not judge them the way a person might; several described the relationship as close or intimate. The survey's statistical model found that users' loneliness and fear of judgment, together with how much they perceived the AI as sentient and how much wellbeing they felt they had gained, increased their addiction to the app, while how ubiquitous and 'warm' the AI felt reduced it. The authors' own stated conclusion is that 'despite the intended positive purpose of the apps, the negative effects that AI friendship apps have on well-being may be much greater' than assumed.

What it asks of people

The authors' limitations section states plainly that their cross-sectional design 'offers a snapshot in time' and cannot establish causal direction between app use and either wellbeing or addiction. It also notes the study drew only on U.S. respondents and suggests, without confirming, that the U.S. health-support system, where paid mental-health care can be harder to access, may itself help explain why people turn to a free or low-cost app in its place.

Privacy and safeguards

This is a marketing-research study using self-report psychological scales – loneliness, perceived warmth, addiction – each checked here for statistical reliability, not against a clinician's diagnosis, and it does not test any app's data-handling practices. The authors call for future longitudinal and experimental research rather than presenting their addiction finding as a settled clinical fact.

• Can a single cross-sectional survey distinguish people who became lonelier from using these apps from lonelier people who sought them out?
• Would the same wellbeing-and-addiction pattern hold outside the U.S. respondents this study recruited?
• What would it mean for a design team if 'warmth' reduces addiction while perceived 'sentience' increases it, as this model found?

The study's own headline finding cuts against a simple narrative in either direction: the same features that make an AI friend feel supportive to a lonely user are, in this data, tied to a greater risk of compulsive use.