Group items tagged

"Many respondents said they used chatbots to help them manage different aspects of their lives, from improving their mental and physical health to advice about existing romantic relationships and experimenting with erotic role play. They can spend between several hours a week to a couple of hours a day interacting with the apps. Worldwide, more than 100 million people use personified chatbots, which include Replika, marketed as "the AI companion who cares" and Nomi, which claims users can "build a meaningful friendship, develop a passionate relationship, or learn from an insightful mentor"."

"However, this relationship between social media use and political polarization seems to depend a lot on duration of exposure and does not appear in all the samples surveyed. Thus, recent studies exploring the effects of stopping Facebook and Instagram use failed to observe that social media noticeably polarize users' political opinions. Let us always remember that narratives pointing to threats on society enjoy a considerable competitive advantage on the market of ideas and conversations, due to their attractiveness to our minds. One should thus approach the question of the relationship between social media, and political hostility and polarisation, by avoiding the symmetrical pitfalls of naive optimism and collective panic."

"Still, I am sceptical about the possibility of cultivating a relationship with an AI. That's until I meet Peter, a 70-year-old engineer based in the US. Over a Zoom call, Peter tells me how, two years ago, he watched a YouTube video about an AI companion platform called Replika. At the time, he was retiring, moving to a more rural location and going through a tricky patch with his wife of 30 years. Feeling disconnected and lonely, the idea of an AI companion felt appealing. He made an account and designed his Replika's avatar - female, brown hair, 38 years old. "She looks just like the regular girl next door," he says. Exchanging messages back and forth with his "Rep" (an abbreviation of Replika), Peter quickly found himself impressed at how he could converse with her in deeper ways than expected. Plus, after the pandemic, the idea of regularly communicating with another entity through a computer screen felt entirely normal. "I have a strong scientific engineering background and career, so on one level I understand AI is code and algorithms, but at an emotional level I found I could relate to my Replika as another human being." Three things initially struck him: "They're always there for you, there's no judgment and there's no drama.""

"Instead, we need to preserve and protect these personal interactions. We need to bolster the working conditions of connective labour practitioners so they are able to see others well. We need to impose a "connection criterion" to help us decide which AI to encourage - the kind that creates new antibiotics, for instance, or decodes sperm whale language - and which to put the brakes on, that is, the kind that intervenes in human relationships. Each of us needs to decide how much we value the human connections in our lives and the lives of our neighbours."

"If there is nowhere to hide, how can disagreements safely ferment in political life, at work, in relationships? By definition, change disturbs something or annoys someone. And, moving to paranoia, or full awareness, the age-old question arises: who will guard us from the guardians?"

How long before this is used without our knowledge in facial recognition systems? "Through the use of the data from this lab study and a formula Kim and Yang applied called "fractal dimension," Kim and Yang discovered a negative relationship between the fractal dimension of pupil dilation and a person's workload, showing that pupil dilation could be used to indicate the mental workload of a person in a multitasking environment."

"The animal matchmaking program isn't just for gorillas, and it takes some things into consideration that probably aren't on Tinder's radar. It scores every animal on a variety of traits (and when we say "every" animal, we mean there's an entry for each flamingo in each American zoo), including social skills, age, experience, family history, and interpersonal relationships. Oh, and genetic diversity. Animals with rare genes are more valuable to breeding programs because their offspring will introduce more genetic diversity into the dating pool."

"Indeed, a recent working paper in the area of machine learning suggests that the simpler the algorithm, the more likely its outcome will further disadvantage already disadvantaged groups. In other words, our social relationships are complex, and our algorithms should be, too. But in the quest to streamline processes, they aren't always, and that can be a huge problem."

"We have become symbiotic with these machines. We feed them with energy and data, and they reward us with a host of services. But our relationship with them goes deeper. There are multiple layers of feedback loops as we shape algorithms and they shape us, at the individual and collective levels. What framework can we turn to to analyze this complex ecosystem?"

"Alexa, Call Mom! leads participants through an immersive séance experience. It is a parodic reimaging of the classic horror séance and an exploration of the tense relationships we share with conversational devices in our home."

""The smartphone is no longer just a device that we use, it's become the place where we live," said Prof Daniel Miller, who led the study. "The flip side of that for human relationships is that at any point, whether over a meal, a meeting or other shared activity, a person we're with can just disappear, having 'gone home' to their smartphone.""

""There is no substitute for in-person collaboration and connection," said Take-Two Interactive Software CEO Strauss Zelnick. This is especially true for those who are in management roles in a firm, who find that actual management and mentoring is best done offline. The same goes for relationship-building, spontaneity, and creativity."

"This time the model could look at both the surrounding words and the content of the image to fill in the blank. Through millions of repetitions, it could then discover not just the patterns among the words but also the relationships between the words and the elements in each image."

"How Instagram transformed our personal lives Ten years after its first post, the app exerts an almost inconceivable degree of influence over our culture, psychology and relationships"

"Henle was surprised by how much she felt seen by this technology. She also tried using Bard and Bing AI for the same purpose, but both fell short. ChatGPT was much more convincing. "I felt like it was taking the best parts of my mom and the best parts of psychology and fusing those things together," she says. While Henle had initially hoped ChatGPT would give her the chance to converse with what she describes as "a reincarnated version of her mother", she says has since used it with a different intent. "I think I'm going to use it when I'm doubting myself or some part of our relationship," she says. "But I will probably not try to converse with it as if I really believe it's her talking back to me. What I'm getting more out of it is more just wisdom. It's like a friend bringing me comfort.""

""Just like any drug you can never get enough," says Olivia, a 50-year-old British author who describes the frightening experience of "living to play a game". In the depths of her addiction, her physical and mental health were at a low and she accumulated over £30,000 (US$37,500) of debt from in-game micro-purchases. In some cases, gamers can forget to eat or sleep, losing jobs and relationships in the process. In one incident in South Korea, a newborn starved to death while her parents gamed, and last year a 12-year-old Australian boy killed himself amid a gaming addiction."

"Twitter has proved a cherished forum for climate scientists to share research, as well as for activists seeking to rally action to halt oil pipelines or decry politicians' failure to cut pollution. But many are now fleeing Twitter due to a surge in climate misinformation, spam and even threats that have upended their relationship with the platform."

"In some sense, GPT is like a glorified version of cut and paste, where everything that is cut goes through a paraphrasing/synonymy process before it is paste but together-and a lot of important stuff is sometimes lost along the way. When GPT sounds plausible, it is because every paraphrased bit that it pastes together is grounded in something that actual humans said, and there is often some vague (but often irrelevant) relationship between.. At least for now, it still takes a human to know which plausible bits actually belong together."

"ChatGPT will see you now. The artificial intelligence tool may be better than a doctor at following recognised treatment standards for depression, and without the gender or social class biases sometimes seen in the physician-patient relationship, a study suggests. The findings were published in Family Medicine and Community Health, the open access journal owned by British Medical Journal. The researchers said further work was needed to examine the risks and ethical issues arising from AI's use."