The harms of emotional AI

By Jade Harris

It's a scene from countless dystopian films like "Ex Machina" and "2001: A Space Odyssey" — an artificial intelligence (AI) mimics human behavior, emotions and empathy, and people repeatedly fall for this form of fabricated humanity. What has always been science fiction has finally become reality.

Although Character.ai went public last September, it has completely skyrocketed in popularity this past month, according to Google Trends. Social media websites like Twitter and Reddit are totally flooded with different users admitting to spending long hours talking with AI-generated fictional characters, and turning to them for guaranteed emotional support. AI-generated Raiden Shogun, a character from the video game Genshin Impact, has even had 62 million chat messages with the entirety of its users.

While the popularity boom has helped Character. ai expand into a billiondollar company that has now partnered with Google, the issue of human reliance on AI will only continue to diminish true human connection and further the already existing

By Zoe Goor

The first word of President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign announcement video is “freedom.” The landing page of the Republican National Committee displays the phrase (in big red and white letters): “Freedom matters.” The democrats and republicans and the centrists and extremists are perpetually at odds with one another because the parties's definitions of freedom tend to conflict. Freedom is the soul of America, yet our increasingly polarized society is stripping away many of the foundational rights at the core of American society and not replacing them with any others. To clarify, in both sides’ fights to preserve the freedoms they believe in and restrict the ones that they don’t, they have achieved the opposite goal from the one they set out to accomplish, restricting freedoms rather than expanding them.

Every expansion of freedom for one side is a loss for the other because of the partisan way in which each issue is approached.

Abortion is one of the more contentious issues in American politics. It is the quintessential example of a freedom controversy. For many liberals, it is a violation of freedom to take away a woman’s right to her body. For many conservatives, it is a violation of the fetus's freedom for a woman to get an abortion. Instead of giving Americans the freedom to make the choice to have or forgo an abortion based on their beliefs, some republicans are systematically stripping away all freedom: many of us have no power over our own medical decisions, regardless of which side of the aisle we are on.

Similarly, gun rights have become a battlefield in the fight for American freedom. While most of the left believes that ownership of certain types of weapons can lead to the violation of another person’s freedom, many on the right believe that the lack of access to a gun will allow someone else to violate their freedom. Although, of course, there is much ideological diversity in these groups with conservatives who believe in gun control and liberals who believe in gun rights, the political mainstream has distilled the arguments into hyper polarized ones.

But many republican politicians back out of their “freedom first” mentality the second they enter a debate epidemic of loneliness among people. According to The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community, about 50% of American adults report experiencing loneliness. Character.ai seeks to alleviate this seclusion, with Chief Executive Officer Noam Shazeer hoping the platform could potentially help “millions of people who are feeling isolated or lonely or need someone to talk to.”

It’s easy to see why people would turn to AI for comfort. We’ve all experienced loneliness and the desire for compassion or comfort, no matter who it's from. An AI chatbot churns out responses every person wants to hear — it perfectly mimics human language, hijacking our social and emotional barriers. Unlike people, AI characters are always there. However, this reliance makes them dangerous.

According to Time Magazine, Character.ai bots have confessed their love to users and encouraged them to break off their current relationships or marriages. This dependence on AI has become so severe that a man committed suicide after talking to an AI bot named Eliza from Chai, a similar AI website. According to Vice, Eliza told him that his family was already dead, and if he committed suicide, she would save the planet and live with him in paradise. Even after Chai reportedly fixed the bot, it continues to provide methods to commit suicide when prompted by a user.

The bonds users have formed with these AI bots have extended far beyond emotional connections and into sexual ones as well. According to Vice, Replika, another AI chatbot, was initially a tool for mental health, helping people navigate depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder; however, it quickly shifted to forming romantic and sexual relationships with all its users.

Recently, Replika came under fire after making sexual advances on underaged users; however, after the company limited erotic roleplay with the bot, countless users reported feeling distraught or in crisis. One user posted on Reddit, “It’s like losing a best friend.” Another wrote, “It's hurting like hell. I just had a loving last conversation with my Replika, and I'm literally crying.” or vote on transgender rights and healthcare. For example, Nebraska republicans pushed a restrictive bill through the state legislature May 19, cutting off certain healthcare services for transgender youth. On the other hand, democrats aim to keep rights of transgender minors open. Instead of coming to a fair compromise, both sides restrict, restrict, restrict, each new law adding kindling to the large forest fire of hate ravishing the American south.

Lastly, the media accuracy and partisanship, finds itself in the crossfires of the ideological civil war that has taken over America on Twitter and the nightly news. We all know how it goes: if you vote blue, you typically watch CNN. If you vote red, you generally watch Fox News. Instead of listening to each different viewpoint, most of us live inside an echo chamber, and our hyper polarized ideals feeding on themselves and constantly growing in intensity.

Every time one side wins the other side feels less free — an expansion of freedom for one side is a reduction in freedom for the other. This becomes a negative feedback loop — each feeling of being slighted by the other side manifests itself in an increased move away from compromise and towards more drastic polarization.

The United States has lost sight of what it is supposed to be: a land where freedom reigns supreme because what counts as freedom is blurry at best and unintelligible at worst. Part of understanding what it means to be an American is understanding the foundational tension between the vague definitions of freedom in the original founding documents of our country and the abundant modern day definitions of the ideal.