AI-driven chatbots are becoming a major industry, with hundreds of millions of people spending hours every day talking to non-human personas. They can be friends, therapists, lovers, work colleagues or fantastical invented characters. Or even an uncanny replica of an actual loved one who has died. But should we be worried about the rise of AI chatbots? What does it tell us about human intelligence and personality that it is becoming possible for computers to mimic us so accurately? What might be lost by getting enmeshed in relationships of various kinds with a non-human artificial personality rather than other embodied, image-bearing human beings?

 

John gave the 2024 John Stott London Lecture on this topic and goes into more detail about some of the ideas we discuss in this episode here: https://www.johnwyatt.com/lecture-authentic-relationships-in-an-artificial-world/