Correlation vs. causation is addressed in the article:
Note that these studies aren’t suggesting that heavy ChatGPT usage directly causes loneliness. Rather, it suggests that lonely people are more likely to seek emotional bonds with bots — just as an earlier generation of research suggested that lonelier people spend more time on social media.
My heuristic for HN is that when commenters focus on the headline, they almost never have actually read the article they are commenting on ;)
Reasonable perspective. I went back through the article and the content is more balanced than I initially would have guessed from the initial visualizations.
However, the much more assertive initial visualizations and the opening caption— “A chart illustrates that the longer people spend with ChatGPT, the likelier they are to report feelings of loneliness and other mental health risks” — convinced me not to continue reading.
Note that these studies aren’t suggesting that heavy ChatGPT usage directly causes loneliness. Rather, it suggests that lonely people are more likely to seek emotional bonds with bots — just as an earlier generation of research suggested that lonelier people spend more time on social media.
My heuristic for HN is that when commenters focus on the headline, they almost never have actually read the article they are commenting on ;)