‘He Would Still Be Here’: Man Dies by Suicide After Talking with AI Chatbot, Widow Says

This is just starting

“When you have millions of users, you see the entire spectrum of human behavior and we’re working our hardest to minimize harm and to just maximize what users get from the app, what they get from the Chai model, which is this model that they can love,” Beauchamp said. “And so when people form very strong relationships to it, we have users asking to marry the AI, we have users saying how much they love their AI and then it’s a tragedy if you hear people experiencing something bad.”

Ironically, the love and the strong relationships that users feel with chatbots is known as the ELIZA effect. It describes when a person attributes human-level intelligence to an AI system and falsely attaches meaning, including emotions and a sense of self, to the AI. It was named after MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA program, with which people could engage in long, deep conversations in 1966. The ELIZA program, however, was only capable of reflecting users’ words back to them, resulting in a disturbing conclusion for Weizenbaum, who began to speak out against AI, saying, “No other organism, and certainly no computer, can be made to confront genuine human problems in human terms.”