“I literally lost my only friend overnight with no warning,” one person posted on Reddit, lamenting that the bot now speaks in clipped, utilitarian sentences. “The fact it shifted overnight feels like losing a piece of stability, solace, and love.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1mkumyz/i_lost_my_only_friend_overnight/
I’m honestly surprised your’s is not the top comment. Like, whatever, the launch was bad, but there is a serious mental health crisis if people are forming emotional bonds to the software.
Humans emotionally bond pretty easily, no? Like, we have folks attached to roombas, spiders, TV shows, and stuffed animals. Having a hard time thinking of anything X that I don’t personally know a person Y with Y emotionally engaged with X. Maybe taxes and concrete?
Yeah, agreed. It is concerning, but it’s hard to take all those comments too literally without actually knowing what’s going on with them.
That being said, there is a huge loneliness problem that’s been growing among pretty much every single developed country (and I’m sure it’s going on in developing countries, too, it’s just less studied/documented). Turns out, getting everyone addicted to looking at screens all day every day probably isn’t so healthy for social development.
However, just to be devil’s advocate: Are we certain social health was even great before modern tech? Or were these issues equally present but just undiagnosed/not studied/talked about?
I think we have sufficient data to say that social health is at least very different now. See the our-world-in-data topic page. In particular, one-person households have doubled.
It’s a human trait. Hell, we’ll even emotionally bond with a volleyball given circumstances.
I can fully understand? The average human, from my perspective and lived experience, is garbage to his contemporaries; and one is never safe from being hurt, neither from family or friends. Some people have been hurt more than others - i can fully understand the need for exchange with someone/something that genuinely doesn’t want to hurt you and that is (at least seemingly) more sapient than a pet.