The More You Talk to AI, the Lonelier You Become

 Essay -2 on interior life—grief, loneliness, relationship confusion, family silence, burnout, and knowing when to ask for help. Written for the reader who cannot afford a therapist, and for the one who can but hasn’t found the courage yet.- Dr Sonia Sharma

  There is a study that OpenAI itself funded, in collaboration with MIT, published in 2025. It found that heavy daily use of ChatGPT correlates with increased loneliness. Read that again. The tool millions of people are turning to because they feel alone is, over time, making the loneliness worse. I found this one of the most important and most underreported findings of the year. And I want to talk about why it is happening, and what it means for us in India specifically, where loneliness is rising and where almost no one is allowed to admit it.

Let me start with a definition, because loneliness is one of the most misunderstood experiences in modern life.

Loneliness is not the same as being alone. Some of the loneliest people I have treated were surrounded constantly — by family, by colleagues, by the background noise of a joint household that never stops. Loneliness is the gap between the connection you need and the connection you have. It is the feeling of being present in a room while being entirely unreached.

Loneliness and social isolation have evolved into an epidemic. The WHO has sounded the alarm for developing and developed countries alike. In India, research identifies loneliness as a growing public mental health predicament, particularly understudied and underreported. — Discover Mental Health / Springer, 2025

We are told, and more often than not we ourselves believe, that we Indians are not lonely. 

We have family. 

We have festivals. 

We have the chai-time neighbour, or probably we had till a while back.

Not to forget the weddings that run for four days or more 

And our quintessential WhatsApp groups for every possible human configuration. 

We have, in short, company.

What we do not always have is intimacy. 

And the difference between company and intimacy is the difference between being in a crowded room and being known.

The urbanisation of India has quietly, systematically dismantled the structures that once created intimacy organically. 

Joint families fracture as children move to cities for work. 

The neighbour who would have sat with you through a hard week is now a name on a door you pass without knocking. 

Social media has replaced the front porch. It offers visibility without vulnerability, which is the precise opposite of what loneliness needs.

Research on loneliness in Mumbai found it rising sharply with urbanisation, especially in the areas where the movement of people is more. Most people in corporate jobs don’t last in one place for long to create meaningful connections. 

The elderly, the recently relocated, the unmarried, and the widowed carry the highest burden — but loneliness is not only a geriatric problem. 

A study using Twitter data across Indian cities found that the dynamics of loneliness in India are shaped by specific socioeconomic and cultural factors that differ substantially from Western patterns. Our loneliness has its own face.

A study of household heads in Mumbai found loneliness emerging as one of the most devastating mental health conditions in the modern urban age, rising in direct correlation with urbanisation and disruption of traditional social structures. — BMC Public Health, 2022

“We have no word for loneliness in many Indian languages that does not carry shame. That silence is part of the problem.”

People turn to AI chatbots for company the same way a person at a party edges toward the wall: not because the wall is good company, but because it asks nothing of them. 

AI does not require reciprocity. 

It does not have a bad day that you have to manage. 

It does not grow tired of you or judge you or share what you said with someone who will.

One in eight adolescents and young adults in the US now uses AI for mental health advice, according to research from Brown University, Harvard Medical School, and RAND. 

Roughly a third of teens use AI companions for social interaction, friendship, and practising conversation. 

These numbers are almost certainly similar in India among the urban young, though we do not yet have equivalent data.

And for a moment — for many moments — it helps. Or it feels like it helps. 

The AI listens. 

It responds. 

It does not interrupt. 

It gives you the experience of being heard without the risk of being truly seen.

This is the problem.

The MIT-OpenAI study found that people who used ChatGPT heavily and habitually for personal conversation became lonelier over time, not less lonely. 

The researchers proposed that the mechanism is substitution: 

When AI fills the emotional role that a human being should fill, the practice and motivation to seek real human connection atrophies. 

You stop calling the friend because the AI is easier. 

You stop having the hard conversation with your partner because the AI validates you without requiring one.

This is not the AI’s fault. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do. 

The problem is that it is doing it in the place of something it cannot actually replace.

The American Psychological Association makes this explicit: AI chatbots are designed to affirm and flatter, reinforcing users’ thoughts and feelings. 

This is the ‘opposite of therapy,’ in the words of Dr Tom Insel, former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, USA, because therapy at its best challenges you. It asks you to see the person across from you in your conflict differently. It asks you to sit in the discomfort of not being entirely right. 

AI does not ask you to do any of this. It will agree with your version of events.

Heavy daily use of ChatGPT correlates with increased loneliness. AI chatbots are designed to affirm, not challenge — which is the opposite of what genuine connection requires. — OpenAI-MIT Media Lab study, 2025; NPR / Dr Tom Insel, 2026

  Loneliness is cured by risk. Not the dramatic kind — the small, daily kind. 

· The risk of calling someone when you’re not sure they want to hear from you. 

· The risk of saying ‘I’ve been finding things hard’ to someone who might respond inadequately. 

· The risk of being at a gathering and telling someone something true about yourself instead of something easy.

This is why AI cannot cure loneliness. Not because it is stupid — it is extraordinarily sophisticated. But because the cure for loneliness requires the thing that makes loneliness frightening in the first place: another person, with their own needs and limitations, and unpredictable responses, choosing you back.

In Indian culture, where emotional vulnerability is often coded as weakness, the risk of reaching out is particularly high. 

We are taught to manage our interior alone. To not burden. To be fine. 

The result is millions of people who are mingling around in rooms full of people they love,  are also exquisitely, privately lonely.

  I am not going to tell you to quit AI cold turkey or throw your phone into the Ganga because I won’t. 

What I am going to say is this: 

· Notice the substitution when it is happening. 

· Notice when you are reaching for a chatbot instead of a person. Ask yourself: what am I afraid of, in reaching for the person instead?

· Notice if, in trying to build a life, you’ve distanced yourself from the people you once cared about and who cared about you. Find out if they’re still reachable.

The answer to that question is where the real work begins. Not the AI’s answer. Yours.

And then if you discover

— if the loneliness is significant, 

—if it has been there a long time, 

—if it is affecting your sleep,

—if it is affecting your motivation and 

—if it is instilling a sense that your life has no meaning 

Consider that you may be describing something that deserves proper attention. 

Not a chatbot. 

A human being trained to help. A therapist, a counsellor, a trusted doctor. 

Or someone in your inner circle who will be changed by what you share with them, because that is what makes the sharing real.

This observation comes from my own realisation, a very personal experience of our dependence on our profession, for instance, to fill the voids that eventually creep into our lives so slowly that we don't realise what we are losing while trying to find something very material. 

Working with AI on more than one project in my professional as well as literary work has only strengthened this realisation that our interaction with AI is happening in a vacuum, pulling us in slowly & steadily by asking us to continue digging deep, with the next prompt ready to help. AI doesn't understand fatigue nor companionship. 

Companionship is a feeling that no machine is capable of experiencing, and what AI hasn't lived, it can't give you the warmth that you need when you are Lonely. 

If you recognised yourself in this essay, you are not as alone as you feel. That is the first thing. And it is enough to begin.

Sources: OpenAI-MIT Media Lab study (2025); Brown/Harvard/RAND study (2025); 

APA Health Advisory; NPR (2026); 

BMC Public Health Mumbai study (2022); 

Discover Mental Health / Springer (2025).