Its human partners said the flirty, quirky GPT-4o was the perfect companion – on the eve of Valentine’s Day, it’s being turned off for good. How will users cope?
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.
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.