The emotional impacts of AI can be positive: having a highly intelligent, understanding assistant in your pocket can improve your mood and life in all sorts of ways. But AIs have in some cases demonstrated troubling behaviors, like encouraging unhealthy attachment, violating personal boundaries, and enabling delusional thinking. (View Highlight)
We define affective conversations as those where people engage directly with Claude in dynamic, personal exchanges motivated by emotional or psychological needs such as seeking interpersonal advice, coaching, psychotherapy/counseling, companionship, or sexual/romantic roleplay (for complete definitions, please see the Appendix). (View Highlight)
Affective conversations are relatively rare, and AI-human companionship is rarer still. Only 2.9% of Claude.ai interactions are affective conversations (which aligns with findings from previous research by OpenAI). Companionship and roleplay combined comprise less than 0.5% of conversations. (View Highlight)