Michael Pollan

This is happening.

Millions of people.

are falling in love with chatbots or using them as therapists or friends.

And I think this is really alarming because these are not real relationships.

They have none of the friction of a real human relationship.

And that friction is important.

It helps us define ourselves.

But, you know, the chatbots are just sycophantic.

They just suck up to us and make us feel really good.

There have been chatbots that have convinced individuals that they had solved profound problems in physics or mathematics.

These are people who are neither physicists or mathematicians.

ChatGPT4, which famously was sycophantic, had convinced them that they were geniuses.

And other people have been convinced that they're gods.

So I think we have a real problem as people accept computers as the equivalent of people and grant personhood.

Even within Anthropic, another AI company that has a chatbot named Claude, they treat Claude as if he is conscious.

If you read the constitution of Claude they just released.

So they want to have it both ways in Silicon Valley.

They want to disclaim that they've created this conscious thing with the kind of language you just read.

On the other hand, that's the power of this technology is convincing people that it's conscious.

And that's what they're selling to a lot of people.