Every time I read about people connecting strongly with chatbots and simultaneously claiming it’s not unhealthy, I’m reminded of a former coworker who began social smoking and insisted to me, “I’m not going to get addicted. I swear.” It wasn’t long before those smoking breaks went from, “I just want to step outside with my coworkers” to a compulsory thing he had to do several times a day, even if nobody else joined him.
It’s worse than smoking or other addictive drugs, though, because this is exploiting humanity’s fundamental need for connection. People are lonely and today’s chatbots provides a poor but “good enough” substitute for human connection to trick the brain. Personally I think these companies have a lot to answer for ethically for creating (and then taking away) a product that deliberately exploits a core need, particularly for people who struggle to make connections in the real world.
Had I read this article ten years before, I would have thought it was hilariously satirical, very funny, albeit a bit dark.
Now I am checking it is really from the guardian.co.uk, and not the onion or Private Eye.
The world has truly gone mad.
Reminds me a bit of the 90s when a popular boyband like Take That disbanded and they had to set up hotlines for distressed teens.
People have gotten used to parasocial relationships with people they will never meet in real life and it only got worse when the “relationship” to celebrities started feeling more personal thanks to social media. People got used to feeling close to people they only ever interacted with through text, so people getting attached to chatbots feels like a logical result of this development.
Things are more serious though - there are many people which are really lonely, there is a mental healrh crisis among teenagers (and both evidently because of social media) and there seem to be many neurodivergent young people which apparently can’t getting qualified help.
(And on top of that, social media and overwork seem to produce symptoms similar to adhd, see “attention deficit trait” - which is not a personality trait, but a kind of burnout symptom!!)
This song still hits me every time I hear it.
It’s from the perspective of a boy who lost his sister because she didn’t want to live in a world where Take That disbanded. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szzhyKY4UKM
Lmao u just can’t make this shit up… humanity truly has lost it
“I can’t live like this” - I’d argue you weren’t even living at all.
