People are increasingly turning to generative AI (e.g., ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot) for emotional support and companionship. While trust is likely to play a central role in enabling these informal and unsupervised interactions, we still lack an understanding of how people develop and experience it in this context. Seeking to fill this gap, we recruited 24 frequent users of generative AI for emotional support and conducted a qualitative study consisting of diary entries about interactions, transcripts of chats with AI, and in-depth interviews. Our results suggest important novel drivers of trust in this context: familiarity emerging from personalisation, nuanced mental models of generative AI, and awareness of people's control over conversations. Notably, generative AI's homogeneous use of personalised, positive, and persuasive language appears to promote some of these trust-building factors. However, this also seems to discourage other trust-related behaviours, such as remembering that generative AI is a machine trained to converse in human language. We present implications for future research that are likely to become critical as the use of generative AI for emotional support increasingly overlaps with therapeutic work.
LLMs can persuade only psychologically susceptible humans on societal issues, via trust in AI and emotional appeals, amid logical fallacies
organization= CogNosco Lab, Department of Psychology；Cognitive Science, University of Trento , city= Rovereto , country= Italy；organization= Institute of Information Science；Technologies ``Alessandro Faedo", National Research Council , country= Italy；organization= Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California , city= Los Angeles , state= California , country= USA；organization= Department of Sociology；Social Research, University of Trento , city= Trento , country= Italy；organization= Centre for Behavioural；Implementation Sciences in Medicine (BISI), National University of Singapore , city= Singapore , country= Singapore
Mapping Caregiver Needs to AI Chatbot Design: Strengths and Gaps in Mental Health Support for Alzheimer's and Dementia Caregivers
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University of Bergen（卑尔根大学）；KTH Royal Institute of Technology（瑞典皇家理工学院）；University of Surrey（萨里大学）；Chalmers University of Technology（查尔姆斯理工大学）；Norwegian University of Science and Technology（挪威科技大学）
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