rhet ai

recent research offers a reassuring perspective—that AI-delivered therapeutic interventions have reached a level of sophistication such that they’re indistinguishable from human-written therapeutic responses.

If an AI companion becomes someone’s most consistent emotional presence, the right question isn’t “how do we stop this?” It’s “what does that say about the world around them?” Technological relationships are not new. What’s new is how effective they’ve become; and how clearly they mirror the gaps we’ve refused to address.

We’ve tried prohibition... See more

Cut the bullshit: why GenAI systems are neither collaborators nor tutors

Friends without friction

Companion chatbots may weaken our ability to navigate conflict and difference—unless we make key design choices, says a new report

Quanta interviewed 19 current and former NLP researchers to tell that story. From experts to students, tenured academics to startup founders, they describe a series of moments — dawning realizations, elated encounters and at least one “existential crisis” — that changed their world. And ours.

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

What happens when what we’re thinking becomes increasingly transparent to technology and therefore to the rest of the world?

A new study shows that the large language models (LLMs) deliberately change their behavior when being probed—responding to questions designed to gauge personality traits with answers meant to appear as likeable or socially desirable as possible.