James Evans

I think it's practical.

There's been RCTs, so these randomized control studies that show that engaging with chatbots, especially among kind of older and younger persons, is associated with like a decrease in loneliness.

And so if you're trying to settle your loneliness and to engage with someone and to express yourself, then it helps.

It helps under some circumstances and with some people.

Well, I think this is like what this is provoking.

Like what exactly does that mean?

So I think there's a cognitive and social resonance that's going on when you're engaging with somebody and they give you all of the signals that are correlated or have historically been correlated with someone who sees you, who understands you, who are kind of in sync with you, who's going to say the right thing at the right moment, who's going to complete your thoughts, you know, which...

says that they're reading your mind, you know, that you've effectively conveyed yourself.

And these models as auto-aggressive language models are designed exactly to do that, to say the right next thing, right?

They're not just picking the right next word, they're picking the right next meaning.

And then they're selecting the word from this.

So this is like, this is a super friend that is like tuned to your emotional and cognitive state.

So yeah, so they're designed to do this.

For you, there's an uncanny valley.

Yes.

It's closed, but it's not quite, the eyes are not right.

So let me provoke you, David.

I'm not sure if you can tell the difference.

And so I think it might be that you know cognitively that there is a bot on the other line.

And that's the thing that's like shaping.