The risks of giving ChatGPT more personality

The latest AI models powering ChatGPT just learned to be friendlier, improving the experience for people who use chatbots responsibly. It could be a problem for those who don't or can't. OpenAI says its latest update makes ChatGPT sound warmer, more conversational, and more emotionally aware. That could be dangerous, though, for people who are isolated or vulnerable. Last month OpenAI estimated that around 0.07 percent of its users exhibit signs of psychosis or mania per week, while 0.15 percent of users send messages indicating potentially heightened emotional attachment to ChatGPT. Those percentages may sound small, but they add up to hundreds of thousands of people. OpenAI's move comes as companies are racing to build systems that can approach or surpass human intelligence. Today's chatbots have already been shown to be highly persuasive; the AI of tomorrow could manipulate users in ways we can't even detect. That makes emotional realism not just a frill, but an existential risk.