Why Do A.I. Chatbots Use ‘I’?

I tried out all the major chatbots for that experiment, and I discovered each had its own personality. Anthropic’s Claude was studious and a bit prickly. Google’s Gemini was all business. Open A.I.’s ChatGPT, by contrast, was friendly, fun and down for anything I threw its way. ChatGPT also had “voice mode,” which allowed it to chat aloud, in a natural humanlike cadence, with everyone in my family, including my young daughters. My takeaway from putting ChatGPT in charge of my household was that generative A.I. chatbots could be helpful, but that there were risks, including making us all sound and act similarly. (Any college professor who has gotten 30 papers written in identical ChatGPTese can relate.) But in the year since, I’ve found that A.I. can have much more extreme effects on people who form intense bonds with it. I’ve written about a woman who fell in love with ChatGPT and about others who have lost touch with reality after it endorsed their delusions. The results have sometimes been tragic. All the chatbots asked follow-up questions, as if they were curious about the person using them and wanted to keep the conversation going. Experts in a field known as human-computer interaction object to this approach. They say that making these systems act like humanlike entities, rather than as tools with no inner life, creates cognitive dissonance for users about what exactly they are interacting with and how much to trust it.