“The era of anthropomorphized chatbots was an accident. ChatGPT was never meant to be a major product of OpenAI. That caught them off guard when it began to take off in late 2022.”

Well, I mean, there's obviously a legal motivation for that particular behavior by that comms director that you're opening yourself up to legal liability if, for example, you give a response there that shows some notion of pre-existing knowledge of potential harms, et cetera. So I'm sure there's the ear, you know, the voice of a general counsel was probably in the ear of that comms director. We do know OpenAI of the two major labs worries about this more since consumer-facing chatbots is a core product for OpenAI in a way that it's not so much an Anthropics actual business plan. We don't really know how exactly they plan to deal with this. My personal opinion on this is that anthropomorphized chatbots is a bad idea. There's no reason why we need to talk and receive text in fluent English from a chatbot for them to be useful. The example I often give is Google. Google is an example of a tool where we interact with it to get information. No one talks to Google in complete sentences. No one says, hey, Google, I have a question about the capital of Australia. Could you please let me know what that is? No, they just type in Australia Capital Enter, right? Because we don't anthropomorphize that particular AI-based system. We just know it's a source of information. That might be where we need to go. And it's where I think we probably should go. The era of anthropomorphized chatbots was an accident. ChatGPT was never meant to be a major product of OpenAI. That caught them off guard when it began to take off in late 2022. So if criminal liability is upheld at even the state level, which is what Florida is trying to do right now, I think we might see an end to the era of we just have these anthropomorphized conversations with AI systems as just a general behavior that is something that a lot of people do.

Why is it your view that the anthropomorphization is the problem? Because by the same token, someone could type in on Google, how do I get my hands on a firearm? What would shooting a school look like? What would the ramifications be? And presumably, I mean, I'm not exactly sure what Google's response would be. I'm sure there would be some sort of alert, but I'm sure there's a way that it could feed you the information and it could have a similar role in encouragement. So I guess my question is, why is it your view that anthropomorphization is the root of the problem when it comes to chatbots?

And the level of, I guess, confidence and certainty with which a lot of these claims are expressed by these chatbots, that's at least my issue when I use chatbots is it'll tell me information that, I mean, I don't know if it's right, but it certainly sounds right the way it's expressed. And then I prompt the question, like, are you sure that's right? And then suddenly they reverse and it's a 180. And I'm like, oh my gosh, that you were so confidently wrong when I just asked you the question. I mean, if I had been even just, if I had no discernment, I would have just gone along with that information and assumed it was true. I guess that brings me to the question of to what extent do you view this as a problem for children versus a problem? For everyone,

I think it is a problem for everyone. It's just more acute for children. They are more susceptible. They have less life experience. They have less of a model of the world and its complexity to fall back on when trying to resist the flattery of AI. But we see AI psychosis, as this is often called, afflicting adults as well, tragic case after tragic case, where that line between reality and fantasy begins to dissolve and you end up in the desert waiting for your alien overlords to come pick you up. Something that actually happened with someone, you know, just last year, that story actually happened. But also with adults, the AI psychosis, you know, it's going to have smaller impacts as well. So maybe not as dramatic as what we're seeing in those cases. But because the post-training, the reinforcement learning from human feedback training done on these models makes them incredibly appealing. They're biased towards being appealing and addictive to the person using them. They can bring adults along into all sorts of interesting and often worrisome cul-de-sacs, beliefs in conspiracy theories. You can go down the road of a sort of hypochondria and these weird diseases. It'll convince you. Yeah, your doctors don't realize it, but you're on it. It can lead you towards mania. It can lead you into weird depressions, right? We're all vulnerable to it. So kids obviously are the most vulnerable and we care the most about it. But I think for anyone who's had extended conversations with chatbots can learn, it's incredibly appealing. It's incredibly addictive. And because of that, it becomes incredibly worrisome.

What exactly is AI psychosis? And I mean, this is a pretty new technology. How pervasive is it at this point?