Why people are falling in love with A.I. companions | 60 Minutes Australia May 4, 2025
To frame this as “non-traditional” relationship is wrong, because it’s not a relationship, because it’s an LLM chatbot. It seems in fact to be mainly a way to collect enormous amounts of information about the mark – the real person interacting with the chatbot. And I’m sure this data mining is being used. But this 60 Minutes Australia piece just tells people “get used to it” which makes me think this is PR to push this as a product. It goes on to frame it as escapism no different than reading a novel. But then juxtaposes some retired professor in Pennsylvania that is married to her chatbot. A weird mix of normalizing the peculiar and a product we know is shoddy and often gives wrong information.
The 60 Minutes Australia piece, did cover a tragedy with a teenager. This video was posted the same day as the Rolling Stone article about people getting supposedly mystical messages from chatbots — based on a reddit thread I’d seen days earlier when a pal dropped the link into a groupchat.
The crux of the matter is that of course people have had active fantasy lives escaping into novels, television shows, video games, or just stories told around campfires likely since the beginning of human language. Of course that’s fine, and nobody’s knocking fantasies nor escape into fiction. But in all these cases most people would find it problematic to go in public and claim a fantasy relationship with a fantasy character is a “real relationship”. It seems like they’re trying to put it into a different category at the same time just because it talks back. So did Teddy Ruxpin. I have a teddy bear, I’m not knocking them, but it’s not a relationship, even if it regurgitates recorded language. And that’s what LLM chatbots do.