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Have you found yourself chatting to ‘wee chatty’ as I call him?
For personal reasons- not just for work?
Well you are not alone!
Here’s something wild from the science world: a recent study called “Increasing happiness through conversations with artificial intelligence” found that people who chatted with AI reported higher immediate happiness than those who simply journaled about the same topics!
What is the world coming to!
But wait, at Joyworks we are about embracing all the routes to joy so it’s worth examining……..
They had 334 participants chatting with an AI and 193 participants journaling.
They compared how people felt right afterward when talking versus writing, especially when the topic was hard—like emotions of guilt and sadness.
Because AI “mirrored” their emotional tone but over the course of the chat (or ‘blether’ as we like to say in Scotland 🙂 participants’ emotions shifted in alignment with that positivity and lifted their mood.
In short: for some negative topics, talking with the AI nudged people up the joy scale more than writing about them did.
Pretty fascinating. Eh?
We feel so much better when we’re “heard” even if the listener is a machine, it’s instant and the simple act of reflecting our words back with encouragement helps us feel seen and lifted.
We all want that.
But another piece of research, a four-week study with 981 people and more than 300,000 chatbot messages looked at how different types of ai conversations (whether by text or voice) affected things like loneliness, social life, and dependency.
Here’s what they found:
- Voice chats did seem to help at first — people felt less lonely than with text — but that effect faded if they used them too often.
- The more people used AI each day, the worse it got: more loneliness, more dependence, and less real-world socialising.
- Personal chats were a bit of a mixed bag — they sometimes made people feel slightly lonelier, but they also seemed to reduce dependency on the AI.
So the science takeaway is this: a little bit of AI chat can give you a lift, but leaning on it too much may actually backfire.
The Joyworks take away?
It can’t laugh with you until you snort.
It won’t squeal at your grand news and swirl you round as you hug.
And it definitely pop the kettle on for a cup of tea and it definitely won’t bring you your favourite biscuits.
So here’s my invitation for you this week:
Have a 5-minute joy-boosting conversation — but make it human.
Pick up the phone.
Call that friend you’ve been meaning to catch up
Share a grand thing that happened to you, A favourite memory you shared. Tell them something you appreciate about them.
Because while the machines are saving us a lot of time and work Joyworks has always been about fun and connection.
And the deepest joy comes not from clever code, but from the messy, marvellous beautiful humans in our lives.
A lack of beautiful humans in your life?
I remember picking a phone up to someone I had a great conversation in the toilets with after just kicking off Scotland’s First Happiness Conference in 2014.
That beautiful lady ‘my Hazey’ became my best friend.
Here’s to five minutes of heart-to-heart joy this week.
Much love Sharon |
