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AI has been looking to develop and enhance a wide range of areas, even how we deal with certain human emotions like
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loneliness. It is something that people have had to deal with since really time began. But can chat bots alleviate or
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eliminate some of the issues around loneliness and what might that mean for things like other medical issues
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potentially something like mental health. Pleasure to be joined here by Stephano Panton who's a marketing
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professor at the Wharton School and co-director of the Wharton Human AI research project. Stephano, great to
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talk to you again. How are you, sir? >> I'm good and great to be here. Thanks,
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Dan. >> You know, the thing is we've talked in so much about AI in the business sense
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or the professional sense. We haven't talked about it a lot from the human sense and how consumers are thinking
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about chat bots. So, what are you seeing play out right now? >> Yeah. So we uh in the business
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conversations around AI. Lots of the use case that we talked about are you know uh professional or um uh for
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productivity and work and things like that. But lots and lots of people all of us really are using chatbots in our
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lives as consumers and we use them for a variety of different things. We look for
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information. We are trying to learn skills. we uh just play with it in some way and uh we get a lot of you know
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useful things done with it from recipes to best time stories and lots of other stuff. But uh one use case that has been
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uh uh become quite prominent and that maybe you know people wouldn't maybe expect uh to that extent until recently
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is the use chatbot for companionship. The idea that you can have what you can call maybe a synthetic friend a or
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partner a chatbot that uh plays out the role of being uh a relationship to you so that you can engage in socio
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emotional processes whether those are you know um friendship based or or um coaching or mentoring based or or maybe
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even romantic and sexual uh in nature. I would think though for something like that, consumers would want to and in
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many cases need to see it actually occur, you know, actually be in action in order to understand kind of the level
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the capabilities that that this might have. It sounds a bit of a crazy idea that you would basically um you know go
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on a chatbot to find a friend, but uh you just have to spend a bit of time using these technologies just to
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understand how humanlike they really are. Especially today when the AI companies are adding a voice layer to
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the system so that you can interact not through text but through voice. is incredibly humanlike. And in our own
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research, we find that people don't expect uh to um see much benefit for you
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know things like loneliness but uh uh they do in fact find that when they try it. So to some extent for many consumers
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might become more um appealing a use case as they get used to the technology. >> So what's going on then in this market?
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I mean how is this developing and and who are some of the main players in this process right now?
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>> Yeah, so this is a burgeoning area. It's been uh really interesting to see how
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this is uh developing. On one hand, you could say the big AI companies are being
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very careful to in a way stay away from this compishing angle. So if you take for example uh OpenAI and Chach, they
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are making I think an admirable and very good job at trying to avoid humanizing the technology. there's no name, you
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know, humanlike avatar. Everything is very tech and explains to you that this is a chatbot at every turn. And I think
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that uh that is besides it to try to avoid some of the uh liability or risks that might come with uh this kind of
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market. Maybe uh we might see that changing a little bit uh uh with time. Certainly we've seen uh say Grock being
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much more aggressive in this space than some of the other big AI companies and otherwise has been less to smaller
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startups companies like Character.ai or Replica that have millions of uh active users and um where a lot of people are
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you know playing with but also uh forging relationships with these spots. >> You were also part of research that
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looked into how AI chatbots might impact something like mental health. Yeah, we've done a few research projects. This
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uh this line of research is led by Julian Desertus from Harvard Business School and what we are doing is
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basically to uh try to explore the consequences of chatbots for these social emotional processes. We have one
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paper where we explore the impact on feelings of loneliness like you hinted at earlier where basically we are have
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participants engage in a 15 minutes conversation with a bot and we measure feelings on loneliness before and after
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the interaction and we find that they're quite effective at reducing loneliness
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and we find also that those people for whom the effect is largest are those people that report higher levels of
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baseline loneliness. So perhaps uh you know that that could be some kind of a tool for the alleviation of um
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loneliness's societal level. We also have in another project um we have an audit of AI systems and then we are
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looking at actual transcripts of uh consumer interaction with bots and we find evidence that a small percentage of
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individuals uh interacting with these bots is likely to be experiencing quite severe mental health issues which
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obviously raise some consumer safety concerns. This technology is not meant to be a let's say mental health tool or
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an FDA regulated. Well, that element of of consumer safety becomes an important component of this conversation, doesn't
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it? And for the companies that are developing these technologies, they have to be wary of, you know, potential
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reputational risk that might hurt their uh business longer term. >> Yeah. Not only reputational risk, even
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uh uh liability legal uh in a legal sense. And I think when I was saying earlier that some of the big eye
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companies have been cautious in the companionship domain is probably coming partly from this. And so right now there
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is around a dozen lawsuits making their way in the courts. Some of them have been high-profile cases at uh newspapers
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like the New York Times have been featuring multiple times and they're directed mostly towards AI companion
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companies especially Character.ai AI as a few but also recently there have been lawsuits to go towards open AI making it
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the point that even though chach is not meant to be an AI companion people can craft prompts that create a companion
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out of chachet and that the company hasn't been monitoring that activity enough. I'm just uh had recently I went
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to a conference when I saw a presentation by one of the key lawyers bringing uh some of these cases to court
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and the list of uh claims being made is quite uh quite something. I can read it to you. Product liability, religions,
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unlicensed practice of psychotherapy, harmful death and slaughter and encouragement of suicide. We'll see
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what's happening with these lawsuits. uh but certainly this is also an element of
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pressure on AI companies and >> but for for the conversation we're having here though this like a lot of
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things around AI still feels like it's very much in the development process right now correct
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>> yeah I mean these models are improving very rapidly companies are learning uh
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how to deploy these models for uh many um uh use cases also learning how to build safety guard rails
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And this space is very develop still very developing very fast. So I think it's a bit early to tell um what uh you
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know this will look like a year or two from now. But it's quite clear that a um
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chatbots can be very effective companions at least give this sense of companionship this illusion if you wish
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depending a little bit on your point of view and b that there is a lot of demand
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from uh from consumers for companionship of that sort. So um certainly there's
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going to be a lot of market pressures towards uh growing this comparatorship area while there are also obvious
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liabilities and concerns like we discussed. >> Stephano always great to talk with you
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and get your insights. Thanks very much. All the best. >> Thank you. >> You got it. Stephano Penton, marketing
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professor here at the Wharton School and also co-director of the human AI research project.