We always knew they weren’t real. (Please say “yes.”)
Would you be alarmed if your 12-year-old spent all his free time holding phony “conversations” with an Al Gore hand puppet? (If your answer is “Heck, no–why should I feel alarmed?,” please seek professional help).
But! A new study says three out of four teens “flock to companion bots despite the risks” (https://www.idahocountyfreepress.com/news/national/three-quarters-of-us-teens-use-ai-companions-despite-risks-study/article_24e2510c-d8d6-5310-83ca-bb73e1e890e8.html). They make “emotional connections” (holy cow) with bots over other people, and discuss “serious matters” with robots rather than with other people.
The risk is, you’ll lose your connections with family and friends and invest yourself in pseudo-relationships with inanimate objects. We would think a 15-year-old boy very odd if he spent all his time talking to a plastic doll. (And no, it does not matter what he thinks it’s saying!)
Okay, sure: I had a teddy bear, and a nice yellow bunny. I was five years old. Nobody ever told me these were actual living creatures, nor did I come to that conclusion on my own. And even if I didn’t know they were dollies then, I didn’t carry them off to high school with me.
I wonder how many dolls have accompanied their owners to college.
This is alarming. An AI bot is essentially going to reflect the personality of the person using it. Some of the best life lessons I’ve ever learned came from the fact that my real life friends didn’t always agree with me and I had to learn that opinions which differ from my own are valid and that I need to take that into consideration. An AI bot is going to return the answer that it’s programmed to return.
Decades ago, there was a virtual pet webpage, where you could logon and have a pet which lives only in your computer. You had to “feed” it, give it attention, etc. by performing simple tasks on the computer, but the idea was that there would be a degree of emotional bond formed which made the user feel compelled to “care” for this non-existent pet. It was an interesting exercise in programming, but ultimately a waste of time, in the long run.
This is true of AI bots. They are not real and not intelligent, in the slightest.