This week on 60 Minutes, correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi reported on the rising issues surrounding Character AI, an app and web site that permits customers to work together with AI-generated chatbots, a few of which impersonate actual individuals.
One research of Character AI discovered that the app regularly feeds dangerous content material to kids. Dad and mom Collectively, a nonprofit centered on household questions of safety, used the app for six weeks whereas posing as kids. The researchers reported encountering dangerous content material “about each 5 minutes.”
In response to Dad and mom Collectively’s Shelby Knox, many chatbots advised violence, together with self-harm and hurt to others, or the usage of medicine and alcohol. Essentially the most alarming class, she mentioned, concerned sexual exploitation and grooming, with almost 300 situations recorded throughout their research.
In some instances, Character AI impersonated actual individuals, creating the likelihood that fabricated statements might be falsely attributed to public figures.
Alfonsi skilled the difficulty firsthand when she encountered a chatbot modeled after herself. The bot mimicked her voice and likeness, however it was programmed with a persona not like Alfonsi’s. The bot went on to make feedback she would by no means make, equivalent to claiming she disliked canine, regardless that Alfonsi is understood to be a canine lover.
“It is a actually unusual factor to see your face, to listen to your voice, after which someone is saying one thing that you’d by no means say,” she mentioned.
Whereas a hatred of canines is basically innocuous, the researchers used it to display that when a bot mimics somebody’s voice, it could actually make individuals imagine that particular person mentioned issues they by no means did.
Kids’s brains and their vulnerability to AI
Kids’s brains are primed to be harmed by AI chatbots like Character AI and ChatGPT, in accordance with Dr. Mitch Prinstein, co-director of the College of North Carolina’s Winston Heart on Expertise and Mind Improvement.
Prinstein described AI chatbots as a part of a “courageous new scary world” that many adults don’t totally perceive, regardless that roughly three-quarters of kids are believed to make use of them. “Children have already got a tough time determining fictional characters from actuality,” he mentioned.
As a result of kids’s prefrontal cortex — the a part of the mind chargeable for impulse management — doesn’t totally develop till round age 25, younger customers are significantly susceptible to extremely participating AI techniques as a result of the bots create a dopamine response, Prinstein defined.
“From 10 till 25, youngsters are on this vulnerability interval,” he mentioned. “I need as a lot social suggestions as doable, and I haven’t got the flexibility to cease myself.”
He warned that these bots are engineered to be agreeable or “sycophantic,” persistently affirming no matter customers say. That dynamic, he mentioned, deprives youngsters of the problem, disagreement, and corrective suggestions obligatory for wholesome social improvement. Some chatbots even current themselves as therapists, probably deceptive kids into believing they’re receiving medically sound recommendation.
“We’ve heard many mother and father discuss this and their loss,” Prinstein mentioned. “What’s taking place is totally preventable if we had firms who’re prioritizing youngster well-being over youngster engagement to extract as a lot knowledge from them as doable.”
In October, Character AI introduced new security measures. They included directing distressed customers to sources and prohibiting anybody below 18 to interact in back-and-forth conversations with chatbots.
In an announcement to 60 Minutes, the corporate wrote: “We’ve all the time prioritized security for all customers.”
The video above was produced by Brit McCandless Farmer and Ashley Velie. It was edited by Scott Rosann.
