Rose Rimler

Whoa.

Like...

You know what's weird, Rose?

I just got goosebumps, which is surprising to me, I have to say.

Yeah, I know.

Yeah, that's really affecting, you know, like this idea that this is like a tool that's useful for people, right?

For some people, it's like, no, this is like really useful.

And like for some people, they have actually said that they think it was life-saving.

Yeah, that's right.

They've said it was life-saving for them.

What?

That is really surprising to me.

But that's only part of the story because the research is new and it's mixed.

I also found a preprint study that found the more time people spent talking to a chatbot, the worse off they were mentally, the lonelier they were.

Oh.

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.

Yeah.

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.