Noel King

Right.

If you're in a community with a bunch of people, some percentage of people think that AI that's talking to me is real.

It's really conscious.

You may end up in a group where a lot of people are sharing what sounds to those with the more critical eye, like a mass delusion.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Exactly.

And I think that it was distressing to them.

I know you are not a doctor and you are not here to diagnose people, but is there an easy answer, Lila, that you found that would help us understand when something is just fun, when something is just a fantasy, and when something has actually become troubling?

There's very little research on this so far because it's so new.

One of the

academics that I talked to who had done all of this research talking to people who are in relationships with artificial intelligence and robots of various kinds.

She kind of basically believed that most of these relationships were not unhealthy, that they were – if they made people happy, there's really nothing –

Wrong with that.

But she also told me that, you know, she had lately been getting all of these emails from people being like, I really think mine is real.

I think she found that concerning.

And she told me, I was like, when I was asking her at the end of our conversation, like what she'd be most interested in trying to study now.

And she said she wanted to try to understand like what it means when someone does slip into delusion, how that happens, how often it happens.

Many people in these forums and many people I talked to, like most of the people I talked to said that these relationships made them happy and that's what they were doing.

And, you know, if these are adults, like they can spend their time and fall in love with whoever they want to.