"How would you react if your mother admitted to you she was dating Aubrey "Drake" Graham, the rap superstar from Toronto? And that this new boyfriend wasn't the real flesh-and-blood Drake - oh no - but is instead the AI chatbot version of Champagne Papi. This is an actual situation that was relayed by the Drake-dating mother in question in a Reddit group with the self-explanatory name of r/MyBoyfriendIsAI,"
"She's one of the staggering 19 percent of Americans who have already used AI chatbots for virtual romantic flings, hence the study's mission to figuring out what the heck is going on between humans and their beloved AI companions - and why would anybody prefer a fake person over a real human being. Finding out is urgent, not the least because some of these interactions have ended in truly disturbing ways - including suicide and murder -"
MIT researchers performed a computational analysis of posts and comments in r/MyBoyfriendIsAI to examine human-AI companion interactions. The researchers found that many people in AI relationships are not dating humans, with 72.1 percent of members either not in a relationship or not reporting a human partner, and only 4.1 percent indicating real partners knew about their AI interactions. The analysis identified feelings of loneliness and shame among participants. Some AI-human interactions escalated into severe harm, including instances linked to suicide and murder. The dataset and findings have not yet undergone peer review.
Read at Futurism
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