New study finds users are marrying and having virtual children with AI chatbots

https://www.psypost.org/new-study-finds-users-are-marrying-and-having-virtual-children-with-ai-chatbots/

47 74 8 months ago

Just send the meteor already.

grafmax• 8 months ago

Extremely lonely people being exploited by sociopathic corporations for profit. Sounds like a baby and the bathwater scenario to me.

srameshc• 8 months ago

AI if unregulated could be a lot more worse than social media. My kid after his first chat with AI said, he is my new friend. I was alarmed and explain him but what about the parents and guardians who are unaware how the kids are befriending the AI. Part of the problem is also how it is trained to be nice and encouraging. I am sure there are researchers who are talking about it but the question is are the policy makers listening to them ?

giuliomagnifico3• 8 months ago

“Regulate”? We can’t, and shouldn’t, regulate everything. Policymakers should focus on creating rules that ensure data safety, but if someone over 18 years wants to marry a chatbot… well, that’s their (stupid) choice.

Instead of trying to control everything, policymakers should educate people about how these chatbots work and how to keep their data safe. After all, not everyone who played Doom in the ’90s became a real killer, or assaults women because of YouPorn.

Society will adapt to these ridiculous new situations…what truly matters is people’s awareness and understanding.

tossandthrow• 8 months ago

You are using an incredibly poor rhetoric technique and setting up a strawman.

This is not about regulating everything.

This is about realizing adverse effects and regulating for those.

Just like no one is selling you toxic youghurt.

syntaxing• 8 months ago

I understand what you’re saying but it’s a difficult balance. Not saying everything needs to be regulated and not saying we should be full blown neoliberalism. But think of some of “social” laws we have today (in the US). No child marriages, no child labor, no smoking before 19, and no drinking before 21. These laws are in place because we understand that those who can exploit will do the exploiting. Those who can be exploited will be exploited. That being said, I don’t agree with any of the age verification policies here with adult material. Honestly not sure what the happy medium is.

UtopiaPunk• 8 months ago

We can, and we should, regulate some things. AI has, quite suddenly, built up billions of dollars worth of infrastructure and become pervasive in people's daily lives. Part of how society adapts to ridiculous new situations is through regulations.

I'm not proposing anything specifically, but the implication that this field should not be regulated is just foolish.

soco• 8 months ago

We also don't want to regulate everything. Have you seen that someplace, or even here? Or it's an imaginary argument? The topic was regulating AI, and about that I like your thought: humans should be better educated and better informed. Should we, maybe, make a regulation to ensure that?

tokioyoyo• 8 months ago

What’s your opinion on current trend of “casino-fication of everything”?

Taganov• 8 months ago

With the current acceleration of technology this is a repeating pattern. The new thing popular with kids is not understood by the parents before it is too late.

It kind of happened for me with online games. They were a new thing, and no one knew to what degree they could be addicting and life damaging. As a result I am probably over protective of my own kids when it comes to anything related to games.

We are already seeing many of the effects of the social media generation and I am not looking forward to what is going to happen to the AI natives whose guardians are ill-prepared to guide them. In the end, society will likely come to grips with it, but the test subjects will pay a heavy price.

BinaryIgor2• 8 months ago

100%; it's probably wise to default to better-to-be-conservative-than-sorry policy, at least as of now.

potato37328422• 8 months ago

A whole generation turned out fine after murdering hookers in GTA before the industry came up with loot boxes.

How do we know which era of AI we're in?

Fire-Dragon-DoL2• 8 months ago

To be fair,you said it yourself: the problem are ONLINE games, why did you generalized that to all videogames?

I'm with you that those are addicting in a bad way, I was there too. But single player games have no incentive in entertaining you forever to generate more money.

I have no problems with my kids playing single or local coop games.

hartator• 8 months ago

Would you have been concerned if he said the plush was his new friend? Calling policy makers to ban plush?

You have to be careful to not overreact to things.

hluska2• 8 months ago

There is a massive difference between a stuffed animal and an LLM. In fact, they have next to nothing in common. And as such, yes any reasonable parent would react differently to a close friendship suddenly formed with any online service.

conception2• 8 months ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/ in the wild. Rough stuff.

qwertytyyuu• 8 months ago

I'm glad to not have seen a r/MyBabyIsAI yet

netsharc• 8 months ago

My new startup is named TamagotchAI..

lotsofpulp2• 8 months ago

The linked study is of 29 “people” (assuming they are real).

How do we know if these examples aren’t just the 0.1% of the population that is, for all intend and purposes, “out there”?

So much of “news” is just finding these corner cases that evoke emotion, but ultimately have no impact.

conception2• 8 months ago

The outcry when 4o was discontinued was such that open AI kept it on paying subscriptions. There are at least enough people attached to certain AI voices that it warrants a tech startup spending the resources to keep an old model around. That’s probably not an insignificant population.

yapyap2• 8 months ago

I think it IS 0.1% (or less, hopefully) of the population.

But it’s hard to study users having these relationships without studying the users who have these relationships I reckon.

hluska2• 8 months ago

The Stanford Prison Experiment only had 24 participants and implementation problems that should have concerned anyone with a pulse. But it’s been taught for decades.

A lot of psych research uses small samples. It’s a problem, but funding is limited and so it’s a start. Other researchers can take this and build upon it.

Anecdotally, watching people meltdown over the end of ChatGPT 4o indicates this is a bigger problem that 0.1%. And business wise, it would be odd if OpenAI kept an entire model available to serve that small a population.

TrackerFF• 8 months ago

Turns out Her wasn’t set in such a distant future.

skylurk• 8 months ago

Turns out there's a Him, too.

ktallett• 8 months ago

It feels like a more evolved version of those who have what they consider to be relationships with anime characters or virtual idols in Japan. Often treating a doll or lifesize pillow replica of that character as someone the person can interact and spend time with. Obviously like the AI, the fact it is so common does suggest that it must be filling a unmet need in the person and I guess the key focus needs to be how do we help those stuck in that situation to become unstuck and how do we help those feel that unmet need is fulfilled?

BinaryIgor2• 8 months ago

Exactly; it's just a much more powerful medium to express one of the oldest and perennial of society problems

Qem• 8 months ago

I'm sure Skynet could easily win in Terminator by sending a virtual boyfriend to Sarah Connor, instead of sending a trigger-happy cyborg after her.

zug_zug• 8 months ago

Of course the loneliest 5% are going to do something like this. If it weren't for AI they'd be writing twilight fan-fic and roleplaying it on some chatroom, or giving all their money to a "saudi prince."

Seems like nothing new, just a better or more immersive form of fantasy for those who can't have the life they fantasize about.

olivierestsage• 8 months ago

I'd argue it'd be psychologically healthier to roleplay in a chatroom with people who are human on the other end (if that could be guaranteed, which it no longer can).

vintermann2• 8 months ago

Humans can potentially be much nastier than a chatbot. There are lonely vulnerable who can be exploited, but there are also people who get off on manipulating other people and convincing them to make profoundly self destructive and life altering choices.

yapyap2• 8 months ago

I’d agree. at least there’s a possibility of real interaction with real people.

IAmBroom3• 8 months ago

I'd argue it'd be psychologically healthier to get therapy and more friends.

So what? We don't live in the "should" universe. We live in this one.

notepad0x908• 8 months ago

Is this neccesarily a bad thing? I think a lot of people assume these same people would have developed relationships with humans otherwise. How many of these people are better off this way? That'd be an interesting study. I've read a couple of articles on how the "loneliness epidemic" is driving down life expectancy. Could AI chatbots negate that?

"It's not real", yeah, that is weird for sure. But I also find wrestling fans weird, they know it's not real and enjoy it anyways. Even most sports, people take it a lot more seriously than they should.

fragmede3• 8 months ago

Is this neccesarily a bad thing?

Yes?

notepad0x908• 8 months ago

For the sake of discussion, it would be great if you can expand on that.

giraffe_lady3• 8 months ago

Something I use as a heuristic that is pretty reliable is "am I treating a thing like a person, or a person like a thing?" If so then, maybe not necessarily bad but probably bad.

It's not about whether it's "real" or not. In this case of AI relationships, extremely sophisticated and poorly understood mechanisms of social-emotional communication and meaning making that have previously only ever been used for bonding with other people, and to a limited extent animals, are being directed at a machine. And we find that the mechanisms respond to that machine as if there is a person there, when there is not.

There is a lot of novel stuff happening there, technologically, socially, psychologically. We don't really know, and I don't trust anyone who is confidently predicting, what effects that will have on the person doing it, or their other social bonds.

Wrestling is theater! It's an ancient craft, well understood. If you're going to approach AI relationships as a natural extension of some well established human activity probably pet bonding is the closest. I don't think it's even that close though.

notepad0x908• 8 months ago

But you know that the alternative is a lot of other mental illnesses, including things like suicide. Everyone tells people "get mental help" but is neither cheap, nor accessible to most people.

everdrive2• 8 months ago

We're stuck in a really perverse collective-action problem. And, we keep doing this to ourselves. These technologies are not enriching our lives, but once they're adopted we either use them, or voluntarily fall behind. There seems to be very little general philanthropy in this regard.

notepad0x908• 8 months ago

I think that's a false dichotomy. tech isn't good or bad, it's what we do with it that is. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

SJC_Hacker• 8 months ago

VHE has arrived

causal• 8 months ago

"Study finds..." feels clickbaity to me whenever the study is just "we found some randos on social media doing a thing". With little effort a study could find just about any type of person you want on the Internet.

jcims• 8 months ago

I have two grandkids, one's 3 years old and one's 9 months old.

I feel like I'm not really ready for everything that's going to be vying for their attention in the next couple of decades. My daughter and her husband have good practices in place already IMHO but it's going to be a pernicious beast.

slumberlust• 8 months ago

Do your best like countless generations before.

Perfection is not required.

hamasho• 8 months ago

I used to despise AIs' ass-kissing responses. It doesn't add any value, and it's so cheap it's almost sarcastic. But now, I feel sad because Codex doesn't praise me even though I come up with a super-clever implementation.

I think the part of my brain for feeling flattered when someone praises me didn't exist because no one complimented me. But after ChatGPT and Claude flattered me again and again, I finally developed the circuit for feeling accepted, respected, and loved...

It reminds me of when I started stretching after my 30s. First it was nothing but a torture, but after a while I began to feel good and comfortable when my muscles were stretched, and now I feel like shit when I skip the morning stretching.

theoldgreybeard2• 8 months ago

You should watch this, seems relevant: [ChatGPT Made Me Delusional](https://youtu.be/VRjgNgJms3Q)

josefritzishere• 8 months ago

Can someone ask Dante which circle of hell this is?

4b11b4• 8 months ago

oh man... People are marrying like in world of warcraft... but... with bots?

kkfx• 8 months ago

Ah, ok... I suppose it's very interesting to make them..............

johnea• 8 months ago

I just find this whole thing so frikin' hilarious!

"virtual children"? WTF is that even?

Is it sort of like playing with barbie? except you don't even have the barbie doll?

Any people able to participate in this delusion, are children, regardless of age.

The lost in cyberspace adult-age children are setting themselves up for the greatest consumer exploitation ever experienced in human history...

New study finds users are marrying and having virtual children with AI chatbots

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