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?
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.
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.