Elon-Post Poll: 27% of US Adults Turn to AI for Personal Queries

Twenty-seven percent of U.S. adults now turn to AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Copilot with personal, emotional or social queries, according to a poll from Elon University's Imagining the Digital Future Center and The Washington Post. The category spans seeking "entertainment, relationship advice, romantic chats, or connection when alone."

Adults under 50 carry most of it. Almost 40% report using AI that way, which the researchers say makes them "more than twice as likely as their elders to be what the Elon University researchers call 'AI companion users.'"

The flatness across other cuts is the other finding worth pausing on. Use "was roughly similar across race, gender or education level," the survey reports, so companion-style use is not concentrated in one slice of the audience the way early-adopter behavior often is.

YouGov ran the fieldwork in May, interviewing more than 4,000 U.S. adults and drawing a representative subsample of 1,000 who regularly used AI for emotional and social queries. Margin of error was 3.7 percentage points. The published write-up does not break out time-in-app, spend per user or share by platform, so where that 27% actually sits between OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and Microsoft is not answered here.