alt Hacker NewsThere are plenty of reasons why having a chatbot partner is a bad idea (especially for young people), but here's just a few:
- The sycophantic and unchallenging behaviours of chatbots leaves a person unconditioned for human interactions. Real relationships have friction, from this we develop important interpersonal skills such as setting boundaries, settling disagreements, building compromise, standing up for oneself, understanding one another, and so on. These also have an effect on one's personal identity and self-value.
- Real relationships have the input from each participant, whereas chatbots are responding to the user's contribution only. The chatbot doesn't have its own life experiences and happenings to bring to the relationship, nor does it instigate autonomously, it's always some kind of structured reply to the user.
- The implication of being fully satisfied by a chatbot is that the person is seeking a partner who does not contribute to the relationship, but rather just an entity that only acts in response to them. It can also be an indication of some kind of problem that the individual needs to work through with why they don't want to seek genuine human connection.
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> The sycophantic and unchallenging behaviours of chatbots leaves a person unconditioned for human interactions
I saw a take that the AI chatbots have basically given us all the experience of being a billionaire: being coddled by sycophants, but without the billions to protect us from the consequences of the behaviors that encourages.
Love your thoughts about needing input from others! In Autistic / ADHD circles, the lack of input from other people, and the feedback of thoughts being amplified by oneself is called rumination. It can happen for many multiple ways-- lack of social discussion, drugs, etc. AI psychosis is just rumination, but the bot expands and validates your own ideas, making them appear to be validated by others. For vulnerable people, AI can be incredibly useful, but also dangerous. It requires individuals to deliberately self-regulate, pause, and break the cycle of rumination.
These are only problems if you assume the person later wants to come back to having human relationships. If you assume AI relationships are the new normal and the future looks kinda like The Matrix, with each person having their own constructed version of reality while their life-force is bled dry by some superintelligent machine, then it is all working as designed.