2025/04/04 by Jason Phang, Phang, Jason, Lama Ahmad +18 · 11 citations
Computer Science · Medicine · Psychology · #AI in Service Interactions #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education #Digital Mental Health Interventions #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2504.03888
openalex publication_date 2025/04/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
As AI chatbots see increased adoption and integration into everyday life, questions have been raised about the potential impact of human-like or anthropomorphic AI on users. In this work, we investigate the extent to which interactions with ChatGPT (with a focus on Advanced Voice Mode) may impact users' emotional well-being, behaviors and experiences through two parallel studies. To study the affective use of AI chatbots, we perform large-scale automated analysis of ChatGPT platform usage in a privacy-preserving manner, analyzing over 3 million conversations for affective cues and surveying over 4,000 users on their perceptions of ChatGPT. To investigate whether there is a relationship between model usage and emotional well-being, we conduct an Institutional Review Board (IRB)-approved randomized controlled trial (RCT) on close to 1,000 participants over 28 days, examining changes in their emotional well-being as they interact with ChatGPT under different experimental settings. In both on-platform data analysis and the RCT, we observe that very high usage correlates with increased self-reported indicators of dependence. From our RCT, we find that the impact of voice-based interactions on emotional well-being to be highly nuanced, and influenced by factors such as the user's initial emotional state and total usage duration. Overall, our analysis reveals that a small number of users are responsible for a disproportionate share of the most affective cues.