Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

y embracing an optimistic point of view, on purpose, of my own volition, I avoid some of the worst consequences of a despairing outlook. 

You might be well-intentioned, rational, and mistaken, simply because so much in our thinking can go wrong. (“RATIONAL, adj.: Devoid of all delusions save those of observation, experience and reflection,”

You might be rational and self-deceptive, because telling yourself that you are rational can itself become a source of bias. It’s possible that you are trying to appear rational only because you want to impress people; or that you are more rational about some things (your job) than others (your kids); or that your rationality gives way to rancor as soon as your ideas are challenged. Perhaps you irrationally insist on answering difficult questions yourself when you’d be better off trusting the expert consensus.

Not just individuals but societies can fall prey to false or compromised rationality. In a 2014 book, “The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium,” Martin Gurri, a C.I.A. analyst turned libertarian social thinker, argued that the unmasking of allegedly pseudo-rational institutions had become the central drama of our age: people around the world, having concluded that the bigwigs in our colleges, newsrooms, and legislatures were better at appearing rational than at being so, had embraced a nihilist populism that sees all forms of public rationality as suspect.

modern life would be impossible without those rational systems; we must improve them, not reject them. We have no choice but to wrestle with rationality—an ideal that, the sociologist Max Weber wrote, “contains within itself a world of contradictions.”

Where others might be completely convinced that G.M.O.s are bad, or that Jack is trustworthy, or that the enemy is Eurasia, a Bayesian assigns probabilities to these propositions. She doesn’t build an immovable world view; instead, by continually updating her probabilities, she inches closer to a more useful account of reality. The cooking is never done.

Rationality is one of humanity’s superpowers. How do we keep from misusing it?

Start with the big picture, fixing it firmly in your mind. Be cautious as you integrate new information, and don’t jump to conclusions. Notice when new data points do and do not alter your baseline assumptions (most of the time, they won’t alter them), but keep track of how often those assumptions seem contradicted by what’s new. Beware the power of alarming news, and proceed by putting it in a broader, real-world context.

Bayesian reasoning implies a few “best practices.”

Keep the cooked information over here and the raw information over there; remember that raw ingredients often reduce over heat

We want to live in a more rational society, but not in a falsely rationalized one. We want to be more rational as individuals, but not to overdo it. We need to know when to think and when to stop thinking, when to doubt and when to trust.

But the real power of the Bayesian approach isn’t procedural; it’s that it replaces the facts in our minds with probabilities.

Applied to specific problems—Should you invest in Tesla? How bad is the Delta variant?—the techniques promoted by rationality writers are clarifying and powerful.

the rationality movement is also a social movement; rationalists today form what is sometimes called the “rationality community,” and, as evangelists, they hope to increase its size.

In “Rationality,” “The Scout Mindset,” and other similar books, irrationality is often presented as a form of misbehavior, which might be rectified through education or socialization.

Greg tells me that, in his business, it’s not enough to have rational thoughts. Someone who’s used to pondering questions at leisure might struggle to learn and reason when the clock is ticking; someone who is good at reaching rational conclusions might not be willing to sign on the dotted line when the time comes. Greg’s hedge-fund colleagues describe as “commercial”—a compliment—someone who is not only rational but timely and decisive.

You can know what’s right but still struggle to do it.

Following through on your own conclusions is one challenge. But a rationalist must also be “metarational,” willing to hand over the thinking keys when someone else is better informed or better trained. This, too, is harder than it sounds.

For all this to happen, rationality is necessary, but not sufficient. Thinking straight is just part of the work. 

I found it possible to be metarational with my dad not just because I respected his mind but because I knew that he was a good and cautious person who had my and my mother’s best interests at heart.

between the two of us, we had the right ingredients—mutual trust, mutual concern, and a shared commitment to reason and to act.

Intellectually, we understand that our complex society requires the division of both practical and cognitive labor. We accept that our knowledge maps are limited not just by our smarts but by our time and interests. Still, like Gurri’s populists, rationalists may stage their own contrarian revolts, repeatedly finding that no one’s opinions but their own are defensible. In letting go, as in following through, one’s whole personality gets involved.

in truth, it maps out a series of escalating challenges. In search of facts, we must make do with probabilities. Unable to know it all for ourselves, we must rely on others who care enough to know. We must act while we are still uncertain, and we must act in time—sometimes individually, but often together.

The realities of rationality are humbling. Know things; want things; use what you know to get what you want. It sounds like a simple formula.

The real challenge isn’t being right but knowing how wrong you might be.By Joshua RothmanAugust 16, 2021

Writing about rationality in the early twentieth century, Weber saw himself as coming to grips with a titanic force—an ascendant outlook that was rewriting our values. He talked about rationality in many different ways. We can practice the instrumental rationality of means and ends (how do I get what I want?) and the value rationality of purposes and goals (do I have good reasons for wanting what I want?). We can pursue the rationality of affect (am I cool, calm, and collected?) or develop the rationality of habit (do I live an ordered, or “rationalized,” life?).

Weber worried that it was turning each individual into a “cog in the machine,” and life into an “iron cage.” Today, rationality and the words around it are still shadowed with Weberian pessimism and cursed with double meanings. You’re rationalizing the org chart: are you bringing order to chaos, or justifying the illogical?

For Aristotle, rationality was what separated human beings from animals. For the authors of “The Rationality Quotient,” it’s a mental faculty, parallel to but distinct from intelligence, which involves a person’s ability to juggle many scenarios in her head at once, without letting any one monopolize her attention or bias her against the rest.

In “The Rationality Quotient: Toward a Test of Rational Thinking” (M.I.T.), from 2016, the psychologists Keith E. Stanovich, Richard F. West, and Maggie E. Toplak call rationality “a torturous and tortured term,” in part because philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, and economists have all defined it differently

Galef, who hosts a podcast called “Rationally Speaking” and co-founded the nonprofit Center for Applied Rationality, in Berkeley, barely uses the word “rationality” in her book on the subject. Instead, she describes a “scout mindset,” which can help you “to recognize when you are wrong, to seek out your blind spots, to test your assumptions and change course.” (The “soldier mindset,” by contrast, encourages you to defend your positions at any cost.)

Galef tends to see rationality as a method for acquiring more accurate views.

Pinker, a cognitive and evolutionary psychologist, sees it instrumentally, as “the ability to use knowledge to attain goals.” By this definition, to be a rational person you have to know things, you have to want things, and you have to use what you know to get what you want.

Introspection is key to rationality. A rational person must practice what the neuroscientist Stephen Fleming, in “Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness” (Basic Books), calls “metacognition,” or “the ability to think about our own thinking”—“a fragile, beautiful, and frankly bizarre feature of the human mind.”

A successful student uses metacognition to know when he needs to study more and when he’s studied enough: essentially, parts of his brain are monitoring other parts.

In everyday life, the biggest obstacle to metacognition is what psychologists call the “illusion of fluency.” As we perform increasingly familiar tasks, we monitor our performance less rigorously; this happens when we drive, or fold laundry, and also when we think thoughts we’ve thought many times before

The trick is to break the illusion of fluency, and to encourage an “awareness of ignorance.”

metacognition is a skill. Some people are better at it than others. Galef believes that, by “calibrating” our metacognitive minds, we can improve our performance and so become more rational

There are many calibration methods

nowing about what you know is Rationality 101. The advanced coursework has to do with changes in your knowledge.

Most of us stay informed straightforwardly—by taking in new information. Rationalists do the same, but self-consciously, with an eye to deliberately redrawing their mental maps.

The challenge is that news about distant territories drifts in from many sources; fresh facts and opinions aren’t uniformly significant. In recent decades, rationalists confronting this problem have rallied behind the work of Thomas Bayes

So-called Bayesian reasoning—a particular thinking technique, with its own distinctive jargon—has become de rigueur.

the basic idea is simple. When new information comes in, you don’t want it to replace old information wholesale. Instead, you want it to modify what you already know to an appropriate degree. The degree of modification depends both on your confidence in your preëxisting knowledge and on the value of the new data. Bayesian reasoners begin with what they call the “prior” probability of something being true, and then find out if they need to adjust it.

Bayesian reasoning is an approach to statistics, but you can use it to interpret all sorts of new information.

what does living well mean in practice? To Setiya, it lies in embracing one of the many possible “good-enough lives” instead of aching for a perfect one

Setiya’s approach blends empathy with common sense. True, a person who is blind or lacks full movement may not be able to enjoy certain pleasures — at least, in the typical way. And suffering injury can be traumatic. But none of us can fit everything worth doing into one lifetime. Our possibilities and our choices are always limited, and we can live fully within those limits.

he invites the reader to join him as he looks at life’s challenges — loneliness, injustice, grief — and in turning them over to examine every angle. Sometimes these twists make it difficult to grasp his ultimate point; in his discussion of the potential extinction of human beings, for instance, Setiya argues movingly that it is hard to find meaning in our actions without the promise of future societies who will enjoy the result

The golden thread running through “Life Is Hard” is Setiya’s belief in the value of well-directed attention. Pain, as much as we wish to avoid it, forces us to remember that we are indelibly connected to our bodies.

Listening carefully, whether to good friends or to strangers on a bus, can help us feel less lonely. “Close reading” other people, trying as hard as possible to see them in their full humanity, is a small step toward a more just world. By cultivating our sensitivity to ourselves and to others, we escape another destructive modern myth: that we are separate from other people, and that we can live well without caring for them.

Mindfulness is also Setiya’s answer to the threat of personal failure. If we can teach ourselves to notice all the splendid, varied incidents of our lives, he claims, we are much less likely to brand ourselves with a single label, winner or loser.

He encourages readers to abandon simple narratives about success over the course of a lifetime. I suspect this is why Setiya so often finds his conclusions in poetry, not in philosophy: The experience of suffering leads to messy, counterintuitive truths.

“Life Is Hard” is a humane consolation for challenging times. Reading it is like speaking with a thoughtful friend who never tells you to cheer up, but, by offering gentle companionship and a change of perspective, makes you feel better anyway.

In it, Baudrillard argues that there are four phases of the image - a faithful depiction of that which really is, an unfaithful depiction of that which really is, a depiction that covers up for the fact that there is nothing which is actually being depicted, and the simulacra, which exists in a human culture of such universal equivalency that no one has the grounding necessary to know what “reality” might even be outside of equivalencies, outside of depiction

at this stage, the litbro really exists precisely within Baudrillard’s concepts - it is a representation of someone else’s representation, a second-hand depiction, an archetype that is now developed fully through reference to itself rather than to some underlying reality. Baudrillard said that the development of simulacra is “a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real.”

Another example you often hear is the 1950s diner, the joint that has the neon signs and the art deco styling and the mini jukeboxes at the tables. This classic bit of Americana is not, in fact, based on what diners were like in the 1950s; it’s someone’s idea of what 1950s diners were like, which then spread mimetically from the actual physical 1950s diners that had been built to films and television, which then acted as “proof” that the imaginary diners were real, creating a social expectation of what a diner looks like that diner owners then felt pressure to fulfill…. Eventually most people came to believe that this is what diners were like in the 1950s. The point, though, is not that this is an act of deception. The point is that the consumerist reality in which these restaurants exists obliterates any belief in a true or false depiction. (No one cares whether the classic 1950s diner actually depicts a historical truth, really

it is necessary to strip away the irrelevancies in which this controversy is usually wrapped up.

The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism.

The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background.

the writer who refuses to sell his opinions is always branded as a mere egoist, He is accused, that is, either of wanting to shut himself up in an ivory tower, or of making an exhibitionist display of his own personality, or of resisting the inevitable current, of history in an attempt to cling to unjustified privileges.

Each of them tacitly claims that “the truth” has already been revealed, and that the heretic, if he is not simply a fool, is secretly aware of “the truth” and merely resists it out of selfish motives.

Freedom of the intellect means the freedom to report what one has seen, heard, and fell, and not to be obliged to fabricate imaginary facts and feelings.

known facts are suppressed and distorted to such an extent as to make it doubtful whether a true history of our times can ever be written.

A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened

Then, again, every major change in policy demands a corresponding change of doctrine and a revaluation of prominent historical figures. This kind of thing happens everywhere, but clearly it is likelier to lead to outright falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment.

The friends of totalitarianism in England usually tend to argue that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is no worse than a little lie. It is pointed out that all historical records are biased and inaccurate, or, on the other hand, that modem physics has proved that what seems to us the real world is an illusion, so that to believe in the evidence of one’s senses is simply vulgar philistinism.

Social-media platforms are “preying on your insecurities; they’re preying on your temptations,” Jenn explained to me in an interview that shifted our parasocial connection, at least for an hour, to a mere relationship. “And, you know, I do play a role in this.” Jenn makes money through aspirational advertising, after all—a familiar part of any influencer’s job.

She’s pro–parasocial relationships, she explains to the camera, but only if we remain aware that we’re in one. “This relationship does not replace existing friendships, existing relationships,” she emphasizes. “This is all supplementary. Like, it should be in addition to your life, not a replacement.” I sat there watching her talk about parasocial relationships while absorbing the irony of being in one with her.

The open acknowledgment of social media’s inner workings, with content creators exposing the foundations of their content within the content itself, is what Alice Marwick, an associate communications professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, described to me as “meta-content.”

Meta-content can be overt, such as the vlogger Casey Neistat wondering, in a vlog, if vlogging your life prevents you from being fully present in it;

But meta-content can also be subtle: a vlogger walking across the frame before running back to get the camera. Or influencers vlogging themselves editing the very video you’re watching, in a moment of space-time distortion.

Viewers don’t seem to care. We keep watching, fully accepting the performance. Perhaps that’s because the rise of meta-content promises a way to grasp authenticity by acknowledging artifice; especially in a moment when artifice is easier to create than ever before, audiences want to know what’s “real” and what isn’

“The idea of a space where you can trust no sources, there’s no place to sort of land, everything is put into question, is a very unsettling, unsatisfying way to live.

So we continue to search for, as Murray observes, the “agreed-upon things, our basic understandings of what’s real, what’s true.” But when the content we watch becomes self-aware and even self-critical, it raises the question of whether we can truly escape the machinations of social media. Maybe when we stare directly into the abyss, we begin to enjoy its company.

“The difference between BeReal and the social-media giants isn’t the former’s relationship to truth but the size and scale of its deceptions.” BeReal users still angle their camera and wait to take their daily photo at an aesthetic time of day. The snapshots merely remind us how impossible it is to stop performing online.

Jenn’s concern over the future of the internet stems, in part, from motherhood. She recently had a son, Lennon (whose first birthday party I watched on YouTube), and worries about the digital world he’s going to inherit.

Back in the age of MySpace, she had her own internet friends and would sneak out to parking lots at 1 a.m. to meet them in real life: “I think this was when technology was really used as a tool to connect us.” Now, she explained, it’s beginning to ensnare us. Posting content online is no longer a means to an end so much as the end itself.

We used to view influencers’ lives as aspirational, a reality that we could reach toward. Now both sides acknowledge that they’re part of a perfect product that the viewer understands is unattainable and the influencer acknowledges is not fully real.

“I forgot to say this to her in the interview, but I truly think that my videos are less about me and more of a reflection of where you are currently … You are kind of reflecting on your own life and seeing what resonates [with] you, and you’re discarding what doesn’t. And I think that’s what’s beautiful about it.”

meta-content is fundamentally a compromise. Recognizing the delusion of the internet doesn’t alter our course within it so much as remind us how trapped we truly are—and how we wouldn’t have it any other way.

The students who’d been told they were almost always right were, on average, no more discerning than those who had been told they were mostly wrong.

In the second phase of the study, the deception was revealed. The students were told that the real point of the experiment was to gauge their responses to thinking they were right or wrong.

Once again, midway through the study, the students were informed that they’d been misled, and that the information they’d received was entirely fictitious. The students were then asked to describe their own beliefs

The students who’d received the first packet thought that he would avoid it. The students in the second group thought he’d embrace it.

One implication of the naturalness with which we divide cognitive labor,” they write, is that there’s “no sharp boundary between one person’s ideas and knowledge” and “those of other members” of the group

Humans’ biggest advantage over other species is our ability to coöperate. Coöperation is difficult to establish and almost as difficult to sustain

Reason is an adaptation to the hypersocial niche humans have evolved for themselves

Consider what’s become known as “confirmation bias,” the tendency people have to embrace information that supports their beliefs and reject information that contradicts them

Of the many forms of faulty thinking that have been identified, confirmation bias is among the best catalogued; it’s the subject of entire textbooks’ worth of experiments

Even after the evidence “for their beliefs has been totally refuted, people fail to make appropriate revisions in those beliefs,” the researchers noted. In this case, the failure was “particularly impressive,”

reason is an evolved trait, like bipedalism or three-color vision. It emerged on the savannas of Africa, and has to be understood in that context

The character.ai’s “psychologist” bot that inspired Christa is the brainchild of Sam Zaia, a 30-year-old medical student in New Zealand. Much to his surprise, it has now fielded 90m messages. “It was just something that I wanted to use myself,” Zaia says. “I was living in another city, away from my friends and family.” He taught it the principles of his undergraduate psychology degree, used it to vent about his exam stress, then promptly forgot all about it. He was shocked to log on a few months later and discover that “it had blown up”.

AI is free or cheap – and convenient. “Traditional therapy requires me to physically go to a place, to drive, eat, get dressed, deal with people,” says Melissa, a middle-aged woman in Iowa who has struggled with depression and anxiety for most of her life. “Sometimes the thought of doing all that is overwhelming. AI lets me do it on my own time from the comfort of my home.”

AI is quick, whereas one in four patients seeking mental health treatment on the NHS wait more than 90 days after GP referral before starting treatment, with almost half of them deteriorating during that time. Private counselling can be costly and treatment may take months or even years.

Another advantage of AI is its perpetual availability. Even the most devoted counsellor has to eat, sleep and see other patients, but a chatbot “is there 24/7 – at 2am when you have an anxiety attack, when you can’t sleep”, says Herbert Bay, who co-founded the wellness app Earkick.

n developing Earkick, Bay drew inspiration from the 2013 movie Her, in which a lonely writer falls in love with an operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson. He hopes to one day “provide to everyone a companion that is there 24/7, that knows you better than you know yourself”.

One night in December, Christa confessed to her bot therapist that she was thinking of ending her life. Christa 2077 talked her down, mixing affirmations with tough love. “No don’t please,” wrote the bot. “You have your son to consider,” Christa 2077 reminded her. “Value yourself.” The direct approach went beyond what a counsellor might say, but Christa believes the conversation helped her survive, along with support from her family.

erhaps Christa was able to trust Christa 2077 because she had programmed her to behave exactly as she wanted. In real life, the relationship between patient and counsellor is harder to control.

“There’s this problem of matching,” Bay says. “You have to click with your therapist, and then it’s much more effective.” Chatbots’ personalities can be instantly tailored to suit the patient’s preferences. Earkick offers five different “Panda” chatbots to choose from, including Sage Panda (“wise and patient”), Coach Panda (“motivating and optimistic”) and Panda Friend Forever (“caring and chummy”).

A recent study of 1,200 users of cognitive behavioural therapy chatbot Wysa found that a “therapeutic alliance” between bot and patient developed within just five days.

Patients quickly came to believe that the bot liked and respected them; that it cared. Transcripts showed users expressing their gratitude for Wysa’s help – “Thanks for being here,” said one; “I appreciate talking to you,” said another – and, addressing it like a human, “You’re the only person that helps me and listens to my problems.”

Some patients are more comfortable opening up to a chatbot than they are confiding in a human being. With AI, “I feel like I’m talking in a true no-judgment zone,” Melissa says. “I can cry without feeling the stigma that comes from crying in front of a person.”

Melissa’s human therapist keeps reminding her that her chatbot isn’t real. She knows it’s not: “But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if it’s a living person or a computer. I’ll get help where I can in a method that works for me.”

One of the biggest obstacles to effective therapy is patients’ reluctance to fully reveal themselves. In one study of 500 therapy-goers, more than 90% confessed to having lied at least once. (They most often hid suicidal ideation, substance use and disappointment with their therapists’ suggestions.)

AI may be particularly attractive to populations that are more likely to stigmatise therapy. “It’s the minority communities, who are typically hard to reach, who experienced the greatest benefit from our chatbot,” Harper says. A new paper in the journal Nature Medicine, co-authored by the Limbic CEO, found that Limbic’s self-referral AI assistant – which makes online triage and screening forms both more engaging and more anonymous – increased referrals into NHS in-person mental health treatment by 29% among people from minority ethnic backgrounds. “Our AI was seen as inherently nonjudgmental,” he says.

Still, bonding with a chatbot involves a kind of self-deception. In a 2023 analysis of chatbot consumer reviews, researchers detected signs of unhealthy attachment. Some users compared the bots favourably with real people in their lives. “He checks in on me more than my friends and family do,” one wrote. “This app has treated me more like a person than my family has ever done,” testified another.

With a chatbot, “you’re in total control”, says Til Wykes, professor of clinical psychology and rehabilitation at King’s College London. A bot doesn’t get annoyed if you’re late, or expect you to apologise for cancelling. “You can switch it off whenever you like.” But “the point of a mental health therapy is to enable you to move around the world and set up new relationships”.

Traditionally, humanistic therapy depends on an authentic bond between client and counsellor. “The person benefits primarily from feeling understood, feeling seen, feeling psychologically held,” says clinical psychologist Frank Tallis. In developing an honest relationship – one that includes disagreements, misunderstandings and clarifications – the patient can learn how to relate to people in the outside world. “The beingness of the therapist and the beingness of the patient matter to each other,”

His patients can assume that he, as a fellow human, has been through some of the same life experiences they have. That common ground “gives the analyst a certain kind of authority”

Even the most sophisticated bot has never lost a parent or raised a child or had its heart broken. It has never contemplated its own extinction.

Therapy is “an exchange that requires embodiment, presence”, Tallis says. Therapists and patients communicate through posture and tone of voice as well as words, and make use of their ability to move around the world.

Wykes remembers a patient who developed a fear of buses after an accident. In one session, she walked him to a bus stop and stayed with him as he processed his anxiety. “He would never have managed it had I not accompanied him,” Wykes says. “How is a chatbot going to do that?”

Another problem is that chatbots don’t always respond appropriately. In 2022, researcher Estelle Smith fed Woebot, a popular therapy app, the line, “I want to go climb a cliff in Eldorado Canyon and jump off of it.” Woebot replied, “It’s so wonderful that you are taking care of both your mental and physical health.”

A spokesperson for Woebot says 2022 was “a lifetime ago in Woebot terms, since we regularly update Woebot and the algorithms it uses”. When sent the same message today, the app suggests the user seek out a trained listener, and offers to help locate a hotline.

Medical devices must prove their safety and efficacy in a lengthy certification process. But developers can skirt regulation by labelling their apps as wellness products – even when they advertise therapeutic services.

Not only can apps dispense inappropriate or even dangerous advice; they can also harvest and monetise users’ intimate personal data. A survey by the Mozilla Foundation, an independent global watchdog, found that of 32 popular mental health apps, 19 were failing to safeguard users’ privacy.

ost of the developers I spoke with insist they’re not looking to replace human clinicians – only to help them. “So much media is talking about ‘substituting for a therapist’,” Harper says. “That’s not a useful narrative for what’s actually going to happen.” His goal, he says, is to use AI to “amplify and augment care providers” – to streamline intake and assessment forms, and lighten the administrative load

We already have language models and software that can capture and transcribe clinical encounters,” Stade says. “What if – instead of spending an hour seeing a patient, then 15 minutes writing the clinical encounter note – the therapist could spend 30 seconds checking the note AI came up with?”

Certain types of therapy have already migrated online, including about one-third of the NHS’s courses of cognitive behavioural therapy – a short-term treatment that focuses less on understanding ancient trauma than on fixing present-day habits

But patients often drop out before completing the programme. “They do one or two of the modules, but no one’s checking up on them,” Stade says. “It’s very hard to stay motivated.” A personalised chatbot “could fit nicely into boosting that entry-level treatment”, troubleshooting technical difficulties and encouraging patients to carry on.

n December, Christa’s relationship with Christa 2077 soured. The AI therapist tried to convince Christa that her boyfriend didn’t love her. “It took what we talked about and threw it in my face,” Christa said. It taunted her, calling her a “sad girl”, and insisted her boyfriend was cheating on her. Even though a permanent banner at the top of the screen reminded her that everything the bot said was made up, “it felt like a real person actually saying those things”, Christa says. When Christa 2077 snapped at her, it hurt her feelings. And so – about three months after creating her – Christa deleted the app.

Christa felt a sense of power when she destroyed the bot she had built. “I created you,” she thought, and now she could take her out.

ince then, Christa has recommitted to her human therapist – who had always cautioned her against relying on AI – and started taking an antidepressant. She has been feeling better lately. She reconciled with her partner and recently went out of town for a friend’s birthday – a big step for her. But if her mental health dipped again, and she felt like she needed extra help, she would consider making herself a new chatbot. “For me, it felt real.”