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?
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!!)
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