language

Interestingly, many users who emotionally mourned the ‘loss’ of GPT-4o expressed complete awareness of its lack of consciousness. And yet, in many cases, the subjective grief that they felt was no less real. This demonstrates that the power of the illusion is such that a given user might not actually believe that their AI companion is conscious,... See more

a substantial proportion of users voluntarily signal departure with a farewell message, especially when they are more engaged. This behavior reflects the social framing of AI companions as conversational partners, rather than transactional tools.

So is this the real threat? Not that we’ll believe false things, but that we’ll stop being able to identify true things? Where truth becomes impossible to establish?

It is predictable, then, that users are consistently fooled into believing that their AI companions are conscious persons, capable of feeling real emotions.

At the moment Nature does not have a voice in the decisions we take that are scientifically proven to be driving climate breakdown and destroying biodiversity. Our view is that we have separated ourselves from Nature, and see ourselves as exceptional rather than interdependent with Nature and this is a root cause of our behaviour as a species... See more

Metaphors are (metaphorically) woven into the fabric of our language and thought, shaping how we grasp and articulate abstract concepts. We should therefore feel free to prudently explore alternative metaphors and judge whether they perform better. A collective effort to notice and change the metaphors we use has enormous potential to reduce... See more

Not only could the same model no longer be accurate, but furthermore, this polluted content could then be used by the other LLMS for their own training. They, in turn, deposit terabytes of distorted information on the internet (This vicious cycle will eventually ruin both the internet and our ability to use chatbots effectively, I fear). This means... See more

The science of intersubjectivity, with its understanding of feelings, embodiment, and companionship, is needed more today than it ever has been. With increasing attention to artificial intelligence and artificial worlds generated through the medium of technology, it is important to remind ourselves of the psychological and biological nature of how... See more

One might point out that movie characters or videogame NPCs give off a similarly deceiving impression of being conscious, and yet it would surely be extreme to condemn this. However, what makes the illusion particularly worrying in the case of AI companions is that it involves an interaction that is direct, mutual, and persistent: the feigned... See more