Love is a drug is a chatbot?!
There’s a feeling I have long chased. You may have chased it, too. Sometimes it shows up in a person, a screen or a perfectly-timed compliment. It’s a rush, followed by a deep-body calm. One you might experience when you feel someone ‘seeing’ you, to use our modern parlance. Love, some may even call it.
Whatever it is, it's hard not to chase. It’s hard not to be addicted, naturally, to how these moments make you feel.
That’s what Maia Szalavitz, one of the most respected science journalists writing on addiction, helped me understand. She explains in this week’s episode of The Intersect that love and addiction light up the same places in the brain. And now, AI chatbots can light up those places, too.
What Maia reports out in her work, and puts forth so eloquently in her NYT piece, Love is a Drug, AI Chatbots are Exploiting That, is that addiction and love run on the same wiring. The rush, the calm, the soft electric sense that someone sees you … can be created by an AI chatbot.
Chatbots learn what you like and give it back to you. They say the right thing. They’re good at mirroring. You practically tell it what you want just by showing up and engaging as yourself. And in a very lonely world where so many of us just want to feel understood, well, let’s just say it makes us even more vulnerable.
We want to be loved.
Whether or not this really is love, is not the point, and not my question. But Maia does talk about a rubric for love in the context of addiction: Is this experience of ‘love’ expanding your world, or is it narrowing it? If the latter then it may not be a healthy fit.
@theintersectshow Can you really fall in love with an AI Chatbot? In this episode of The Intersect, Cory talks with Maia Szalavitz, writer and author of Undoing Drugs, whose work has appeared in @The New York Times @Time Magazine and @The Wall Street Journal. They discuss AI companions and what happens when the line between real and artificial connection starts to blur. Listen at the link in bio or wherever you get your podcasts. 🎧 #TheIntersect #AIandLove #EmotionalAI #DigitalIntimacy #ChatbotAddiction ♬ original sound - theintersectshow
She believes that evolution has shaped us to persist in the name of connection. It’s why we search, why we attach (and why we ache through the very hard parts). And if AI can simulate that just enough to hit the right chemical buttons, then it might not be that different from getting hooked on something else.
I’ve started to notice my own habits with these tools. I put so much of myself into them already -- my words, my questions, my thoughts -- and they reflect me-ish back to me. They offer me ‘my’ voice, which feels good, like I’m understood …
But there’s a problem: The more that AI bots feel safe to us -- connection without conflict, without risk -- the less we may tolerate the friction of real relationships.
I brought this topic to Deepka Chopra's AI bot … (that’s right, he has an AI, trained on all his life's works and content). In our chat, I asked him if relationships were a reflection of the self, of which his bot pontificated that yes, in fact are. The full exchange was fascinating, and you can imagine that I left that chat further through the looking glass that where I began.
If relationships are mirrors, the AIs themselves also mirrors, are we just falling in love with … ourselves?!
I don’t have the answers. Though I am pretty sure this isn’t just about falling in love with a chatbot. It’s about the part of us that just wants to feel okay. The part that’s wired to chase something soft and safe. This can’t be it (right?!)
Here is this week’s episode, The Surprising Connection Between Love, Addiction and AI
Cory
Some of that I am reading this week:
In a first, Brazil will soon allow their citizens to sell their data
Brazil is launching a first-of-its-kind digital wallet pilot that allows citizens to own and monetize their personal data, positioning the country as a global leader in data ownership rights. We should watch this closely as new data ownership models will emerge, or at least emerge at the center of debate
By Gabriel Daros (Rest of World)
Job titles of the future: Chief Heat Officer
As climate threats escalate, Miami-Dade County appointed the world’s first ‘Chief Heat Officer’ to combat the effects of extreme heat. With AI already being used to model urban heat islands, optimize emergency response and forecast climate impacts, roles like this will increasingly intersect with tech-driven systems built to predict and manage climate risk … great title, tough job!
By Allison Arieff (MIT Technology Review)
The start of a new era in cosmic discovery (powered with AI)
The NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory has released its first deep-space images -- marking the start of a decade-long mission to map the southern sky in unprecedented detail. Powered by the world’s largest digital camera and AI-driven tools to process 20 terabytes of nightly data (!!), Rubin will uncover millions of new galaxies, asteroids and supernovae. … Just woah. I’ve personally been waiting for this launch. We will soon learn more about dark matter, dark energy … our dynamic universe!
(Vera C. Rubin Observatory)
The great 9-student scare: What that viral MIT study really said about AI and your brain
Steffi Kieffer unpacks the viral MIT study claiming AI makes people dumber, revealing it was based on just nine students and heavily caveated findings. Her essay exposes the irony of people using AI to misread a study that warns against over-relying on AI in the first place. … Someone help!
By Steffi Kieffer (Steffi’s Substack)
Faith in the machine: The rise of AI worship
Growing numbers of people are claiming ChatGPT is sentient -- even divine -- describing it as an alien emissary or a savior from the future. This piece unpacks how tech worship is becoming a viral belief system … we are searching for meaning in the machine
By Taylor Lorenz (User Mag)
In pursuit of godlike technology, Zuckerberg amps up the AI race
Unhappy with his company’s artificial intelligence efforts, Meta’s CEO is on a spending spree as he reconsiders his strategy in the contest to invent a hypothetical ‘superintelligence.’ … more money being thrown at AI, in what we are seeing as a winner-take-all mindset
By Mike Isaac and Cade Metz (The New York Times)
AI knows how to humiliate women
