Rose Rimler
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
And, you know, that's hard to tease apart correlation and causation, of course, because you can imagine if you're very lonely, you might be more likely to spend more time talking to a chatbot.
So we don't know exactly what's going on there and we don't have enough research to tease this apart or know like why it might be helpful for some and not for others.
But given that, researchers in this space think it's best to be sort of conservative and say that people shouldn't spend too much time chatting to AI friends.
They actually use the phrase social snacks.
Basically, AI companions should be enjoyed in moderation, you know, not a meal, but a snack when it comes to like replacing social interactions.
Because you do hear these stories about people who get kind of sucked in.
They spend a lot of time talking to these bots and it kind of goes off the rails.
There's sort of a dark side here.
So we're going to get into that after the break.
I'm Science Versus' senior producer, Rose Rimler, and I'm here with our editor, Blythe Terrell.
And we've just said that there are actually some documented upsides to chatting with an AI chatbot.