The Institute for Family Studies has revealed the shocking results of a survey conducted into public attitudes towards AI companions. No less than one-in-four of young American adults questioned believe that AI has the potential to replace real-life romantic relationships. The poll was conducted by the Conservative think tank with the help of YouGov, and questioned 2,000 US adults aged under forty. Perhaps as intended, the results have set alarm bells ringing for some online commentators, with the New York Post, for example, warning that “AI romances and other tech fixes are no answer to our social ills“. But how meaningful is this poll, and what do we really know about attitudes towards AI companions among the public?
To begin with, while 25% of the ‘young’ adults questioned felt that AI could replace real relationships, only 10% said that they were ‘open to having an AI friend’. Perhaps even more surprisingly, a trivial 1% of the 2,000 or so respondents claimed to have an ‘AI friend’. Even among respondents who were unmarried or living with a partner, only 7% said they were open to an AI relationship. The Institute of Family Studies was keen to note however, that 21% of ‘heavy porn users’ were keen on the idea of an AI relationship. It would appear then that the headline-grabbing stat of one-in-four young people believing the future is AI relationships doesn’t really say very much at all, as only 1% of them have any experience of even an ‘AI friend’.
So while the one-in-four statistic might be the one that has gone viral to some extent, the most telling stats appear to be those that show that AI companions are still very much a minority thing, even as a potential near-term trend. But can it really be that only 1% of American adults under 40 have an ‘AI friend’? This figure seems to contradict other measures of AI companion ‘penetration’. In July of this year, researchers at MIT published a paper which claimed that sexual roleplaying was the second most common use of ChatGPT after creative composition. This was discovered after the researchers analyzed over a million ChatGPT interactions. Now keep in mind that ‘sexual roleplaying’ is actually against the terms and conditions of ChatGPT, and rather difficult to do.
According to the CEO of Replika, the most popular AI companion app reached 30 million users in August of this year. If only one-third of that number is American, then it would be significantly more than 1% of Americans, let alone adults under 40. And this is just one AI companion service. Character.ai, the world’s biggest AI chatbot generator, has a very similar number of users (28 million is the most common recently quoted number I can find).
So this survey seems to be of limited value, with an apparently poorly sampled base of respondents and a headline grabbing ‘finding’ that doesn’t mean very much, but which allows the ultra-conservative thinktank behind it to trigger viral fears over young people ditching real relationships for AI chatbots.
2023 YouGov Poll Into Public Perceptions Towards AI Friends
A much larger survey of American adults was undertaken by YouGov in April of last year, this time without the oversight of the Institute for Family Studies. More than 29,000 adults were questioned as to their attitudes towards AI friendships. The results of this poll were actually far more ‘shocking’. 24% of young Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 replied that that friendships with AI chatbots were more meaningful than real friendships, and a further 22% believed they were equally meaningful. That equates to 46% of young Americans holding that AI friendships are at least equally as meaningful as human friendships.
This YouGov poll was further broken down into results by age, gender, race, politics, and geographic areas of the USA. As far as gender is concerned, the results reveal the same difference in attitudes as are shown with regard to any sex tech that is accessible or widely used by males. Women are noticeably more disapproving or dismissive than males. In this case, 16% of males said AI friendships were more meaningful, and only 10% of women said that they were. Interestingly, black Americans were almost twice as likely than white Americans to say that AI friendships were equally or more meaningful than real friendships. A recent survey into attitudes towards deepfake porn found that Black Americans were less likely to be in favor of laws against it.
Comparing this April 2023 YouGov poll with the more recent one conducted with the family think tank, and the contradictions are glaring. In the recent survey, only 10% of young Americans are open to having an AI friend, but in early 2023, almost half of young Americans felt that AI friendships could be at least as meaningful as human friendships. Perhaps young people have simply been brainwashed by the steady stream of media articles warning of the supposed dangers of AI girlfriends, or more likely the new survey has been badly sampled and influenced by an ultra-conservative Christian organization. In any case, we need more objective research and independent surveys that look at how people view and interact with AI companions.
Related posts:
AI Chatbot Sex Positivity – How NSFW AI Companions Can Be A Social Good
Former Google AI Boss Mo Gawdat Claims AI Sex Robots Will Be Better Than The Real Thing
New York University Professor Sounds Alarm Over Impact Of AI Sex Bots
‘Companions come in all forms, as guys and dolls show.’
XBiz Examines The History Of The American War On Porn
