The explosive growth of AI chatbots in the past three years, since ChatGPT launched in 2022, has started to have some really noticeable, profound, and honestly disturbing effects on some users. There\u2019s a lot to unpack there \u2014 it can be pretty complicated.<\/p>\n
So I\u2019m very excited to talk with today\u2019s guest, New York Times reporter Kashmir Hill, who has spent the past year writing thought-provoking features about the ways chatbots can affect our mental health.<\/p>\n
One of Kashmir\u2019s recent stories<\/a> was about a teenager, Adam Raine, who died by suicide in April. After his death, his family was shocked to discover that he\u2019d been confiding deeply in ChatGPT for months. They were also pretty surprised to find, in the transcripts, a number of times that ChatGPT seemed to guide him away from telling his loved ones. And it\u2019s not just ChatGPT: Several<\/a> families<\/a> have filed wrongful death suits against Character AI, alleging that a lack of safety protocols on the company\u2019s chatbots contributed to their teenage kids\u2019 deaths by suicide.<\/p>\n Then there are the AI-induced delusions<\/a>. You\u2019ll hear us talk about this at length, but pretty much every tech and AI reporter \u2014 honestly, maybe every reporter, period \u2014 has seen an uptick in the past year of people writing in with some grand or disturbing discovery that they say ChatGPT sparked. Sometimes these emails can be pretty disturbing. And as you\u2019ll hear Kashmir explain, plenty of the people who get into these delusional spirals didn\u2019t seem to suffer from mental illness in the past.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not surprising that a lot of people want somebody to do something about it, but the who and the how are hard questions. Regulation of any kind seems to be pretty much off the table right now \u2014 we\u2019ll see \u2014 so that leaves the companies themselves. You\u2019ll hear us touch on this a bit, but not long after we recorded this conversation, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote a blog post<\/a> about new features that would theoretically, and eventually, identify users\u2019 ages and stop ChatGPT from discussing suicide with teens.<\/p>\n But as you\u2019ll hear us discuss, it seems like a big open question if those guardrails will actually work, how they\u2019ll be developed, and when we\u2019ll see them come to pass.<\/p>\n If you\u2019d like to read more on what we talked about in this episode, check out the links below:<\/p>\n