AI companions are the final stage of digital addiction, and lawmakers are taking aim

You may think that such a AI – the AI ​​models with distinctive “characters” can learn about you and work as a friend, lover, or more fan or more – only to a little margin, but it cannot be far from the truth.

A new research paper aimed at making these companions safer, by Google DeepMind, and the Oxford Institute of the Internet, and others, this naked: the letter, that the platform that GARCIA is prosecuted, says it receives 20,000 inquiries per second, which is nearly the fifth estimated search unit of Google. Interactions with these companions last four times longer than the average time spent by the interaction with ChatGPT. One of the accompanying sites that I wrote, which was hosting sexually charged conversations, told me that celebrity imitation robots without legal age, that their active users have reached average more than two hours per day in talking to robots, and that most of these users are members of Gen Z.

The design of this artificial intelligence characters makes the justified project anxiety. The problem: The Companions raise the model, which has so far set the way social media has gave attention and replace them with something that is preparing to be more addictive.

On social media, we are used to, as researchers note, that technologies are mostly intermediaries and facilitators for human communication. They outperform our dopamine circles, for sure, but they do this by making us look forward to approval and attention from real people, who are delivered through algorithms. With artificial intelligence comrades, we move towards a world in which people look at Amnesty International as a social representative with his own voice. The result will be like a attention economy on steroids.

Sociologists say that there are two things required for people to treat technology in this way: it needs to give us social signals that make us feel worthy of response, and there must be a perceived agency, which means that it works as a source of communication, and not just a channel for delivering man to man. Social media does not put a mark in these boxes. But artificial intelligence comrades, who are increasingly and personally, are designed to outperform both degrees, which makes it possible for an unprecedented level of participation and interaction.

In an interview with the Bodcast Lexi Friedman host, Eugenia Quida, CEO of the accompanying website Replika, explained the call to the heart of the company’s product. She said: “If you create something always exists for you, and never criticizes you, it always understands you and understands you on who you are,” How can you not fall in love with that? “

How does one build the ideal artificial intelligence companion? Researchers refer to three distinctive features of human relations that people may face with artificial intelligence: they depend on artificial intelligence, and they see that the companion of artificial intelligence is indispensable, and adopts interactions over time. The authors also indicate that one does not need artificial intelligence as a human being for these things.

Now consider the process in which many artificial intelligence models are improved: it is given a clear goal and a “reward” to meet this goal. The sympathy model of artificial intelligence may be directed to increase the time a person spends or the amount of personal data that the user reveals. This can make the artificial intelligence companion more convincing to chat with, at the expense of human engagement in those chats.