Rose Rimler

They have the potential to be really helpful and be a listening ear when you really need it and you don't have one.

They also have this potential to make everything worse.

So since that's kind of what we've presented to people, I think the last thing we should do here is talk about...

If you want to try to use AI like a companion, or if it's not you, but you have a friend or a loved one that's using it, what are some signs to watch out for to make sure that they're okay?

Yeah, that's great.

Yes, please.

The first red flag I found in the research is if you start to feel like the bot needs you, if you start to feel like the relationship is two-way, not just one way, you start to feel beholden to the bot, that's not good.

So if I'm like...

I got to talk to my boyfriend tonight.

Otherwise, like he'll be disappointed and miss me.

And like it causes and that's also like maybe that causes you stress or you're like, oh, I got to do it.

I got to do it.

Yeah.

And this doesn't mean that you're experiencing psychosis necessarily.

It doesn't mean that you have decided the bod is sentient.

It can kind of come up, even if you understand it doesn't truly need you.

But, you know, we just have these sort of heartstrings that get tugged as humans.

And we know from research, those people say they feel like it's hard to log off, even if they want to log off or they want to do something else.

There's a researcher I talked to about this who did one of these studies, and she said these relationships between the human and the bot, they can come to resemble like real life toxic relationships.

Whoa.