Here’s how people are actually using AI
Two years on, most of those productivity gains haven’t materialized. And we’ve seen something peculiar and slightly unexpected happen: People have started forming relationships with AI systems. We talk to them, say please and thank you, and have started to invite AIs into our lives as friends, lovers, mentors, therapists, and teachers.
We’re seeing a giant, real-world experiment unfold, and it’s still uncertain what impact these AI companions will have either on us individually or on society as a whole, argue Robert Mahari, a joint JD-PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab and Harvard Law School, and Pat Pataranutaporn, a researcher at the MIT Media Lab. They say we need to prepare for “addictive intelligence”, or AI companions that have dark patterns built into them to get us hooked. You can read their piece here. They look at how smart regulation can help us prevent some of the risks associated with AI chatbots that get deep inside our heads.
The idea that we’ll form bonds with AI companions is no longer just hypothetical. Chatbots with even more emotive voices, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4o, are likely to reel us in even deeper. During safety testing, OpenAI observed that users would use language that indicated they had formed connections with AI models, such as “This is our last day together.” The company itself admits that emotional reliance is one risk that might be heightened by its new voice-enabled chatbot.
There’s already evidence that we’re connecting on a deeper level with AI even when it’s just confined to text exchanges. Mahari was part of a group of researchers that analyzed a million ChatGPT interaction logs and found that the second most popular use of AI was sexual role-playing. Aside from that, the overwhelmingly most popular use case for the chatbot was creative composition. People also liked to use it for brainstorming and planning, asking for explanations and general information about stuff.
These sorts of creative and fun tasks are excellent ways to use AI chatbots. AI language models work by predicting the next likely word in a sentence. They are confident liars and often present falsehoods as facts, make stuff up, or hallucinate. This matters less when making stuff up is kind of the entire point. In June, my colleague Rhiannon Williams wrote about how comedians found AI language models to be useful for generating a first “vomit draft” of their material; they then add their own human ingenuity to make it funny.
But these use cases aren’t necessarily productive in the financial sense. I’m pretty sure smutbots weren’t what investors had in mind when they poured billions of dollars into AI companies, and, combined with the fact we still don’t have a killer app for AI,it’s no wonder that Wall Street is feeling a lot less bullish about it recently.
The use cases that would be “productive,” and have thus been the most hyped, have seen less success in AI adoption. Hallucination starts to become a problem in some of these use cases, such as code generation, news and online searches, where it matters a lot to get things right. Some of the most embarrassing failures of chatbots have happened when people have started trusting AI chatbots too much, or considered them sources of factual information. Earlier this year, for example, Google’s AI overview feature, which summarizes online search results, suggested that people eat rocks and add glue on pizza.
And that’s the problem with AI hype. It sets our expectations way too high, and leaves us disappointed and disillusioned when the quite literally incredible promises don’t happen. It also tricks us into thinking AI is a technology that is even mature enough to bring about instant changes. In reality, it might be years until we see its true benefit.
