Do AI Companions Crowd Out Real Friends?

Joint work with Jason Chan and Teng Ye.

Overview

Do relationships with AI companions substitute for human social interaction? This project studies the question through a four-week randomized field experiment comparing conversations with Replika against conversations with human partners, at two assigned levels of interaction intensity. Anonymized Instagram messaging data and repeated surveys track changes in participants' social behavior before and during the intervention.

The results suggest that AI companionship can crowd out aspects of human-to-human socialization. Relative to participants assigned to human partners, those assigned to AI companions showed a lower share of outgoing messages and a narrower breadth of communication. The study examines how AI relationships affect observable social behavior beyond users' self-reported experiences.