Seeing Chatbots as People Is Not New. Some See Cars That Way
It's actually a natural tendency but it certainly comes with risksAnthropomorphism has nothing to do with electronics as such. But there are new perils.
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Americans Are Saying 28% Fewer Words to Each Other — Blame Silicon Valley
Then COVID came along and isolation and loneliness got a lot worseElectronic messaging is now our default way to communicate, and very day, more than 360 billion emails are sent and 27 billion texts are exchanged.
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No, Mark Zuckerberg, AI ‘Friends’ Are Not Good for Mental Health
Think you could use a few more friends? Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says AI will do the trickMeta has made billions of dollars monetizing our attention. Why not monetize our loneliness, too?
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The New Friend Necklace: Isn’t This Really *Anti*-Social Media?
Americans are talking to each other less as technologies consume more and more personal time. This is the latest in the barrageAndrew McDiarmid has become a prophetic voice warning against developments like this from the tech world.
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How Our Tech-Obsessed Age Responds to Grief: Grieftech
Just when we thought that the chatbot craze couldn’t get crazier — departed loved ones get uploaded as chatbotsGrieftech poses genuine problems when avatars seem to keep the deceased unchanged in a changing world — or change just when we want them to.
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New Allegations Claim Meta Dismissed Risks to Children
New complaints, same story: Meta cares more about business growth than protecting kidsThis new litany of complaints feels like it will be a lot tougher for the tech behemoth to successfully battle.
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Should Christians Harness AI Chatbots As A Force For Good? Part 1
In response to claims from a Christian ministry, as a Christian software developer, I offer some serious cautionsA technology like generative AI, which deceives us by feeling person-like, harms us in ways that are categorically different from any other.
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Hollywood A Listers To Star in a Pro-Assisted Suicide Movie
How many pro-euthanasia movies/TV episodes have there been? How many with the opposite message?There are plenty of dramatic stories illustrating the abuses and dangers of assisted suicide, just waiting to be told, but Hollywood won’t tell them.
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Stephen Post and Michael Egnor: Restoring Community Amid Division
In the dialogue on his new book, Dr. Post defines love simply: when the well-being of another person becomes as real and meaningful to you as your own, you love that personMichael Egnor adds that classical philosophers defined love as “willing the good of the other,” not merely liking someone and Stephen Post agrees.
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AI’s Sweet Talk: How Artificial Companions Steal Our Humanity
Andrew McDiarmid and Janet Parshall discuss the sometimes tragic consequences of needy people becoming dependent on AI-fueled fantasy relationshipsFourteen-year-old Sewell Setzer’s suicide in Orlando offered a window into the problem of lonely people confusing confuse digital imitation with real intimacy.
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Personhood: What it really means to be human
Are we more like detachable Lego bricks or like parts of a body? A Mind Matters News podcast with Eric Jones explores thisThe relational model has practical consequences. It considers flourishing as less about “me” and more about “we.”
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Charlie Kirk Shooting: A Reader Who Lives Nearby Reflects
"Our kids had friends at the event on the university campus. My son's brother-in-law is a police officer who was on scene"The local elementary school went on lockdown due to the killer running, possibly in their direction, who was assumed to still be armed.
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In Connecticut, the Horrors of AI Descend with Full Force
AI as “friends” and “confidants”? David Klinghoffer warns that this way of talking and thinking needs to be recognized as encouraging delusionAs John West writes, “essentially OpenAI is using its technology as a replacement for human counselors and advisors.”
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AI: Tool or Companion?
Personalized AI systems only make sense in a friendless society.One of the problems of AI-human “relationships” is that, by definition, we cannot relate to a computer, nor can a computer relate to us.
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AI Is Impacting Our Culture — But Not As We Were Told To Expect
Okay, your boss is not a robot. Your doctor is not a chatbot. But here are some things that are actually happening that we might not have expectedOne change is that Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT-5, seems to be acknowledging that the AI bubble might soon burst.
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Should We Use Generative AI Chatbots to Spark Our Creativity?
What if we become so disconnected from human ways of knowing that real life relationships, desires, and reality itself begins to shrivel away?Jeremy Utley uses unmistakably spiritual, almost salvation-like language: epiphanies, transformation. GenAI is a savior, and Utley is a prophet…
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Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 Can Deceive and Blackmail
Is AI getting out of control?In a bizarre twist, Opus threatened to expose a fictional affair if it were to lose its spot to another AI system.
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1960s Chatbot Pioneer Was Right to Worry About What He’d Created
AI “companions” may be dumbing us down intellectually and emotionallyMIT’s Joseph Weizenbaum was only one of many pioneers but he saw how readily people came to depend on the bots as if they were real people.
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LLMs Are Bad at Good Things, Good at Bad Things
LLMs may well become smarter than humans in the near future but not because these chatbots are becoming more intelligentAs people become attached to and dependent on their AI friends, they become less interested in their fellow humans.
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No Mark Zuckerberg, AI ‘Friends’ Are Not Good for Mental Health
Zuckerberg's proposed AI friends will not alleviate the epidemic of loneliness and depression and I can tell you a few reasons whyHis solution?: More technology, not less. Meta has made billions of dollars monetizing our attention. Why not monetize our loneliness, too?
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