Quarter of young Dutch AI-users share more with chatbot than friends, family

Over half (51 percent) of young Dutch people who use AI discuss personal matters like dating, social situations, and mental health with the chatbot. A quarter (23 percent) even share more with the chatbot than they do with their friends and family, EenVandaag found in a survey of approximately 1,100 members of its opinion panel between the ages of 16 and 34.

86 percent of the respondents said they use AI programs like ChatGPT or Google Gemini. 47 percent do so daily. Several commented on how natural it feels ot chat with the AI bots. “I have better conversations with AI than with real people,” one respondent said. Another: “I have had an unexpectedly funny conversation with ‘him’ a few times, where in a normal conversation you would say the vibe was good and you had to laugh at each other’s reactions.”

23 percent of respondents said that they sometimes share more intimate details about their lives with chatbots than with their loved ones. One respondent said they used ChatGPT as a “sort of talking diary” after their relationship ended. “Here I could vent many of my deep emotions without being a burden to anyone else.”

"I have a number of very specific hobbies and interests that I can't really share with anyone in real life,” another respondent said. "When I discuss this with an AI, I do notice enthusiasm and interest, which I don't get from real people."

24 percent of young people use AI programs for a quick chat. 7 percent of respondents said that they consider the chatbot a kind of friend. Young people who indicate that they have few or no friends are more likely to discuss personal matters with a chatbot and more often feel a friendly bond with AI.

48 percent of respondents don’t like that chatbots remember information you shared, and 31 percent worry about what will happen with this information. “I have never heard of a tech company doing anything good with people’s information,” one respondent wrote. But the majority, 67 percent, are not very worried about this.

Cultural sociologist Siri Beerends from the University of Twente told EenVandaag that she finds it worrying that so many young people use AI for personal conversations. "The only thing a chatbot does is calculate," she said. "It predicts the most likely word in a sentence based on probability. And calculating is, of course, something very different from thinking, feeling, and being able to empathize with the other person. You would almost forget that, because it is so good at simulating understanding."

She worries that young people will lean more and more on AI and, as a result, trust their own voice less. Sharing vulnerabilities is an important part of growing up and developing your own personality, Beerends said. She called it a shame that a “thoughtless computer model” provides young people with “bite-sized answers” to their lives’ complexities.