by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad
This Monday, just like every day, Alice logs into her laptop. She starts chatting with her fovorite chatbot and feels that something is off. She has been talking to the chatbot almost every day for the last two years. This morning, however, the conversation seems different. It feels stiff, as if she was talking to a different person. She continues talking and realizes that responses coming from the chatbot are very generic. To her, it feels as if the chatbot had a lobotomy or worse, it has died. The fact of the matter is that nothing has died. Still the same app. She can keep talking to “it” for as long as she likes. After an hour or so of interaction, he comes to the realization that her companion is gone. She now feels a sense of loss. She is well aware of the fact that the system that she is interacting with is not real, and yet cannot help mourn in grief. Scenarios like these are playing out tens of thousands of times in various parts of the world. In all the cases, the output is the same. The company on the other side of the aisle updates the model and the end user feels that something is lost, which leads to mourning. This phenomenon is different from wire-born, which I’ve written about before, because in this case the end user actually knows that the chatbot was not real. And yet they cannot help themselves feel that there’s a sense of loss. This is phenomenal. I experienced this more than 10 years ago when I gave the first version of the grandpa bot. In my case, even though I knew that the model is not real, I literally coded it up, and yet I felt overwhelmed with emotions.
A study reported by the Harvard Gazette in September found that some users of AI companions experience genuine grief when a model update alters the personality of the companion they had come to know. Additionally, researchers at the MIT Media Lab, in a paper titled “Death” of a Chatbot: Investigating and Designing Toward Psychologically Safe Endings for Human-AI Relationships, have offered the most systematic look yet at what happens when these relationships end. Read more »
