For several hours on Friday evening, I ignored my husband and dog and allowed a chatbot named Pi to validate the heck out of me.

My views were “admirable” and “idealistic,” Pi told me. My questions were “important” and “interesting.” And my feelings were “understandable,” “reasonable” and “totally normal.”

At times, the validation felt nice. Why yes, I am feeling overwhelmed by the existential dread of climate change these days. And it is hard to balance work and relationships sometimes.

But at other times, I missed my group chats and social media feeds. Humans are surprising, creative, cruel, caustic and funny. Emotional support chatbots — which is what Pi is — are not.

All of that is by design. Pi, released this week by the richly funded artificial intelligence start-up Inflection AI, aims to be “a kind and supportive companion that’s on your side,” the company announced. It is not, the company stressed, anything like a human.

Pi is a twist in today’s wave of A.I. technologies, where chatbots are being tuned to provide digital companionship. Generative A.I., which can produce text, images and sound, is currently too unreliable and full of inaccuracies to be used to automate many important tasks. But it is very good at engaging in conversations.

That means that while many chatbots are now focused on answering queries or making people more productive, tech companies are increasingly infusing them with personality and conversational flair.

Snapchat’s recently released My AI bot is meant to be a friendly personal sidekick. Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is “developing A.I. personas that can help people in a variety of ways,” Mark Zuckerberg, its chief executive, said in February. And the A.I. start-up Replika has offered chatbot companions for years.

A.I. companionship can create problems if the bots offer bad advice or enable harmful behavior, scholars and critics warn. Letting a chatbot act as a pseudotherapist to people with serious mental health challenges has obvious risks, they said. And they expressed concerns about privacy, given the potentially sensitive nature of the conversations.

Adam Miner, a Stanford University researcher who studies chatbots, said the ease of talking to A.I. bots can obscure what is actually happening. “A generative model can leverage all the information on the internet to respond to me and remember what I say forever,” he said. “The asymmetry of capacity — that’s such a difficult thing to get our heads around.”

Dr. Miner, a licensed psychologist, added that bots are not legally or ethically accountable to a robust Hippocratic oath or licensing board, as he is. “The open availability of these generative models changes the nature of how we need to police the use cases,” he said.

Mustafa Suleyman, Inflection’s chief executive, said his start-up, which is structured as a public benefit corporation, aims to build honest and trustworthy A.I. As a result, Pi must express uncertainty and “know what it does not know,” he said. “It shouldn’t try to pretend that it’s human or pretend that it is anything that it isn’t.”

Mr. Suleyman, who also founded the A.I. start-up DeepMind, said that Pi was designed to tell users to get professional help if they expressed wanting to harm themselves or others. He also said Pi did not use any personally identifiable information to train the algorithm that drives Inflection’s technology. And he stressed the technology’s limitations.

“The safe and ethical way for us to manage the arrival of these new tools is to be superexplicit about their boundaries and their capabilities,” he said.

https://www.belganewsagency.eu/we-will-live-as-one-in-heaven-belgian-man-dies-of-suicide-following-chatbot-exchanges

https://www.businessinsider.com/widow-accuses-ai-chatbot-reason-husband-kill-himself-2023-4

https://www.brusselstimes.com/430098/belgian-man-commits-suicide-following-exchanges-with-chatgpt

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-microsoft-chatgpt.html