Falling In Love, Literally, With Chatgpt

But our ancestors also evolved a remarkable capacity to“groom” one another verbally . This drove the evolutionary cycle in which the language centers in our brains became larger, and what we did with language became more complex.

More complex language in turn enabled more complex socializing with larger networks of relatives, friends and allies. It also enlarged the social parts of our brains.

Language evolved alongside human social behavior. The way we draw an acquaintance into friendship or a friend into intimacy is largely through conversation.

Experiments in the 1990s revealed that conversational back-and-forth, especially when it involves disclosing personal details, builds the intimate sense our conversation partner is somehow part of us.

So, I'm not surprised that attempts to replicate this process of“escalating self-disclosure” between humans and chatbots result in humans feeling intimate with the chatbots .

And that's just with text input. When the main sensory experience of conversation – voice – gets involved, the effect is amplified. Even voice-based assistants that don't sound human, such as Siri and Alexa, still get an avalanche of marriage proposals .

If OpenAI were to ask me how to ensure users don't form social relationships with ChatGPT, I would have a few simple recommendations.

First, don't give it a voice. Second, don't make it capable of holding up one end of an apparent conversation. Basically don't make the product you made.

The product is so powerful precisely because it does such an excellent job of mimicking the traits we use to form social relationships.

The writing was on the laboratory chalkboard since the first chatbots flickered on nearly 60 years ago . Computers have been recognized as social actors for at least 30 years. The advanced voice mode of ChatGPT is merely the next impressive increment, not what the tech industry would gushingly call a“game changer.”

That users not only form relationships with chatbots but develop very close personal feelings became clear early last year when users of the virtual friend platform Replika AI found themselves unexpectedly cut off from the most advanced functions of their chatbots.

Replika was less advanced than the new version of ChatGPT. And yet the interactions were of such a quality that users formed surprisingly deep attachments.

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The risks are real

Many people, starved for the kind of company that listens in a non-judgmental way, will get a lot out of this new generation of chatbots. They may feel less lonely and isolated . These kinds of benefits of technology can never be overlooked.

But the potential dangers of ChatGPT's advanced voice mode are also very real.

Time spent chatting with any bot is time that can't be spent interacting with friends and family. And people who spend a lot of time with technology are at greatest risk of displacing relationships with other humans.

As OpenAI identifies, chatting with bots can also contaminate existing relationships people have with other people. They may come to expect their partners or friends to behave like polite, submissive, deferential chatbots.

These bigger effects of machines on culture are going to become more prominent. On the upside, they may also provide deep insights into how culture works.

Rob Brooks is scientia professor of evolutionary ecology and academic lead of UNSW's Grand Challenges Program, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

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