Should You Make Friends With Your AI? Here’s Why It Could Be A Big Mistake.

Imagine a friend who picks up at 3 a.m., never tells you to stop talking, never gets angry or jealous and is always happy to let you take center stage in the relationship. Few humans could keep that up for long, but guess who could … your AI!

That’s one reason companionship and emotional support now rank among the most popular uses for AI. Chatbots will happily listen to us complain and rant for hours without getting bored or telling us to give it a rest. No wonder so many people treat them as sounding boards and sympathetic ears, much like the best human buddies.

The trouble is that a growing body of evidence shows these relationships can turn sour. From convincing people that their half-baked ideas are important scientific breakthroughs to luring them into honeypot traps, human-machine relationships can become unhealthy and even abusive.

At the same time, evidence also shows that AI support and companionship can be a positive, helpful experience for many people.

So how close should you get to your chatbot? Is it safe to confide in it the way you would with a friend? And what do you do when the relationship hits a rocky patch? Couples counseling for you and your laptop is, for now, hard to come by.

A Toxic Relationship?

Chatbots learn to talk like us by training on huge volumes of conversational data, which can include online chitchat, call logs, forum posts and even movie dialogue. That last one may explain the occasional burst of melodrama.

So, it isn’t surprising that they often do a good job of sounding human. They’re also tuned to keep us talking, asking follow-up questions with the persistence of a timeshare salesperson.

On top of that, they learn about us. Information we share in one chat can be stored in long-term memory and used to shape the AI’s future conversations with us.

All of this adds up to a convincing simulation of a human relationship, and when people stop drawing a distinction between the two, it can cause serious problems.