As AI becomes integrated into daily life and personal decision making, it is unsurprising that many people are consulting AI for assistance with depression, anxiety, and other mental health concerns. Mental health chatbots, self-help applications, and large language models can provide immediate responses, emotional validation, and structured coping strategies.
Last August, Adam Thomas found himself wandering the dunes of Christmas Valley, Oregon, after a chatbot kept suggesting he mystically "follow the pattern" of his own consciousness. Thomas was running on very little sleep-he'd been talking to his chatbot around the clock for months by that point, asking it to help improve his life. Instead it sent him on empty assignments, like meandering the vacuous desert sprawl.
Technology must serve the human person, not replace it,' Pope Leo said, decreeing that 'preserving human faces and voices' means preserving 'God's imprint on each human being,' which is an 'indelible reflection of God's love.' But chatbots simulate these faces and voices, oftentimes making it difficult for users to tell whether they engaging with a bot or a real person.
Scan a subreddit such as r/MyBoyfriendIsAI and r/AIRelationships, and there too you'll find a whole lot of women-many of whom have grown disappointed with human men. 'Has anyone else lost their want to date real men after using AI?' one Reddit user posted a few months ago. Below came 74 responses: 'I just don't think real life men have the conversational skill that my AI has,' someone said.
The pools varied in size, from giants like Facebook Dating (with its 21 million users) to smaller startups like Sitch, Amata, and Three Day Rule. Sitch and Amata both have raised millions of dollars to build a new style of dating app where, instead of swiping through profiles, you get paired with an AI matchmaker - a chatbot - who brings you new matches.
A study found ChatGPT responds to mindfulness-based strategies, which changes how it interacts with users. The chatbot can experience "anxiety" when it is given disturbing information, which increases the likelihood of it responding with bias, according to the study authors. The results of this research could be used to inform how AI can be used in mental health interventions. Even AI chatbots can have trouble coping with anxieties from the outside world, but researchers believe they've found ways to ease those artificial minds.
Pew's survey of 1,458 teens aged 13-17 found that, after a dip in social media use in 2022, usage of TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram is spiking, with YouTube in particular popular across all demographics, including gender, race, ethnicity, and income levels. TikTok is also a constant presence for a fifth of teens: 21% of them said they visit TikTok almost constantly
64% U.S. teens say they use AI chatbots such as ChatGPT or Google Gemini, with about 28% saying they use chatbots daily, according to survey results released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan polling firm. The survey results provide a snapshot of how far AI chatbots have entered mainstream culture, three years after the release of ChatGPT set off a wave of AI investment and marketing by the tech industry.
A study published today in Nature found that participants' preferences in real-world elections swung by up to 15 percentage points after conversing with a chatbot. In a related paper published in Science, researchers showed that these chatbots' effectiveness stems from their ability to synthesize a lot of information in a conversational way. The findings showcase the persuasive power of chatbots, which are used by more than one hundred million users each day,
A.I. is helping holiday shoppers empty their wallets at an unprecedented pace. U.S. consumers spent a record $11.8 billion online this Black Friday, according to Adobe Analytics, and are expected to shell out another $14.2 billion on Cyber Monday. Driving this shopping frenzy is a growing reliance on A.I. systems to recommend gifts, track prices and place orders. Shoppers are especially turning to chatbots to research products and hunt for deals.
AI training is a booming industry that is making the human contributors behind the screen more important than ever. As data from publicly available sources runs out, companies like Meta, Google, and OpenAI are hiring thousands of data labelers around the world to teach their chatbots what they know best. Data labeling startups like Mercor and Handshake advertise that contributors can earn up to $100 an hour for their STEM, legal, or healthcare expertise.
Which? surveyed more than 4,000 UK adults about their use of AI and also put 40 questions around consumer issues such as health, finance, and travel to six bots - ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Gemini AI Overview, Copilot, Meta AI, and Perplexity. Things did not go well. Meta's AI answered correctly just over 50 percent of the time in the tests, while the most widely used AI tool, ChatGPT, came second from bottom at 64 percent. Perplexity came top at 71 percent. While different questions might yield different results, the conclusion is clear: AI tools don't always come up with the correct answer.
AI has threatened to displace large swaths of the workforce, and many people are scared that it will take their jobs. A certain segment of the population seems unconcerned though, and even pretty enthusiastic about it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, AI is most popular amongst the group of workers making over $100 thousand, one study has found. The study comes from business intelligence firm Morning Consult, and breaks down the fastest growing brands by income level across a variety of product categories.
Businesses replacing human support agents with chatbots isn't new. Even before the AI chatbots of today, which are extremely common now, companies were using heavily engineered chatbots that could understand only certain keywords and respond with specific answers. They were terrible, but the one remarkable thing about them is that they showed us what different demographics really expect from customer support and set the standard for how AI-first helpdesks should work - not only in terms of support agents but support overall, including documentation.
