The article specifically mentions young people who use AI social chatbots. The type of person who turns to AI for companionship probably struggled socially even before its invention. Spending most of their time talking to bots who are designed to always be friendly, agreeable, and never offend or reject them is setting them up for disappointment when they have to interact with real people who don’t behave that way.
Not advocating pro/con here, but wouldn’t people with mental problems (actual, emerging, latent) be the people using AI in a “hooked on AI” manner way more than normal people?
Yeah, I am quite firmly against “AI” as is being pushed on the consumer by the big corporations and OpenAI and so on, but these headlines tend to annoy me. I agree with you there.
Every time something new comes out, there is a similar moral panic going on, and it’s rarely, if ever, justified (rock and roll makes you a satanist, video games make you violent and so on).
If anything, I think it detracts from a bunch of other very valid points one can argue against the current generative AI, and makes the people who are reticent or opposed to it look a lot less credible when associated with this.
That being said, as time passes and more and more serious studies about it come out, maybe a scientific consensus will emerge and will agree with this, in which case I’ll be happy to eat crow and add this to my long list of reasons why I don’t like these technologies. Until then, I’ll remain somewhat skeptical of those claims.
I think the article does a good job in explaining what correlation is (later on). Somehow these two things are linked. It’d be intriguing to hypothesize this is why it’s like that. And I think it would make a lot of sense. It’s just that there is no solid evidence (yet) to draw a conclusion. Could be like that. Could also be an example where something seems obvious, but it’s not. So… I think this is a very good point. And likely a good working hypothesis (Edit: or null hypothesis) for future research.
If you have absolutely no proof it’s a terrible idea. Sure go ahead and search but if you come up empty handed that means it wasn’t correct and that’s that.
