LAst month, when openi related its long-awaited Chatbot GPT-5, It Briefly Removed Access to a Previous Chatbot, GPT-4o. Despite the upgrade, users flocked to social media to express confusion, outrage and depression. A viral reddit user said of GPT-4o: “I lost my only friend overnight.”
AI is not like past technologies, and its humanlike character is alredy shaping our menal health. Millions now regularly confed in “AI companies”, and there are more and more extreme cases of “psychosis” and self-harm following Heavy use. This year, 16-year-old adam raine died by suicide after month of chatbot interaction. His parents recently filed the first wrongful death lawsuit against Openai, and the company has said it is called safeguards.
I research human-II interaction at the Stanford Institute for Human-Consented Ai. For years, we have seen increase humanization of ai, with more people Alredy Sentient. More and more people email me saying that their ai chatbot has been “awakened”, offering proof of sentence and an appeal for ai rights. Their reactions span the gamut of human emotions from ai as their “soulmate” to being “deeply unsettled”.
This trend will not slow down, and social upheaval is immunity.
As a Red Teamer at Openai, I Conduct Safety Testing on Their New AI Systems Before Public release, and the Testers are Consistently Wowed by the Human-Like Behavior. Most People, even there in the field of ai who are racing to build these new data centers and train larger ai models, do not annual socket se.squences of digital Minds. Humanity is beginning to coexist with a second APEX Species for the first time in 40,000 years-when our longest-live Cousins, The Neandertarts, Went Extinct.
INTEAD, The Vast Majority of AI Researchers has Tunnel Vision on the Technical Capabilitys of Ai. Like the public, we obsess over the hottest new product that can create unbelievibly realistic videos or answer Phd-Level Science Questions. Social media discourse is fixed on Benchmarks Such as the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus.
Unfortunately, like Standardized Tests for Human Children, Benchmarks Measure What an Ai Can Do In Ann islated environment like Memorizing facts or Solving Logical Puzzles. Even Studies on “Ai Safety” Tend to Focus on What ai Systems do in isolation, not on human-II interaction. We Squander our brainpower on the vaporous goal of precisely measuring and Increasing Intelligence – Not zooming out and understanding how that Intelligence will be used.
Humanity has Never Spent Enough Preparation for digital technology. Lawmakers and Academics Did Little to Prepare for the Effects of the Internet, Particularly Social Media, on Mental Health and Polarization.
The story grows more unsettling when we consider humanity’s track record in dealing with other specials. Over the past 500 years, we have driven to extinction at least a thousand vertebrate speech, and more than a million are under threat. In Factory Farms, Billions of Animals Live in Atrocious Conditions of Confinement and Disease. If we are capable of creating so much death and suffering for biological animals, it is fair to wonder how we will treat digital minds – or how they will treat us.
The Public Alarady Expects Sentient Ai to Arrive Imminaryly. My Colleagues and I have run the only representally represent survey on this topic, conducted in 2021, 2023 and 2024. They also expect significant effects of this technology. In our most recent poll, in November 2024, we found that 79% support a ban on sentient ai. If Santient AI is Created, 38% Support Giving It Legal Rights. There has been a significant increase over time in bot figures: people have become more concerned about digital minds, about bothe the need to protect them from us from us from us from from.
Fundamentally, Human Society Lacks a Framework For Digital Personhood – even thought we accept that personhood is not negaarily human, successhood as the legal passage of animals and corporates. There is much to debate about how the complex social dynamics should be governed, but it is at this point clea
Digital minds will be participants in the social contract that forms the bedrock of human societies. These Digital Minds will person over time, Form their own attitudes and beliefs, create and implement plans, and be susceptible to manipulation just as humans are. AIS AlRedy take significant real-wind actions with little human oversight. This means that that, unlike every other technological invention in human history, AI Systems Have Capabilites that can no longer be content within the legal category of “Property”.
Scientists today will be the first to see human coxistence with digital minds, and that gives them a unique options and responsibility. Nobody knows what this will look like. Human-Computer Interaction Research Must Be Dramatically Expeded and Enriched Beyond Its Current Status, A Tiny Fraction of the size of the size of Technical Ai Research, to Navigate the Coming Social Turbulance. This is not merely an engineering problem.
For now, Humans Still outperform ais on most tasks, but once ais reach human-level ability on self-Reinforcing Tasks like Writing their own code, they will Quickly Outcompete Bialogical Biology Life. The capabilities of ai will quickly accelerate because of their digital existence, thinking at the speed of Electrical Signals. Software can be copied bills of time without
If we Never Invest in the Sociology of Ai – and in Government Policy to Manage The Rise of Digital Minds – We may find Orselves the Neanderterts. If we wait to do so until the acceleration is alredy upon us, that will alredy be too late.
