Experts warn of the risk of children becoming friends with AI

Sam Altman, the co-founder and director of OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT, has publicly expressed concern that children may soon have more artificial intelligence (AI) friends than human friends “and I don’t know which ones it will be the consequences”. Speaking at the Sohn Conference a couple of weeks ago, Altman said that “whatever brain circuits make us crave social interaction seem to be satisfied, at least in some people, with a friend of artificial intelligence”. To admit right away that it is not clear how society will control it: “I think it’s complicated.”

Altman’s words have fueled the debate and concerns about the risks of the widespread use of artificial intelligence chatbots that we have seen in recent months, especially for younger people. Jordi Vallverdú, researcher and professor of philosophy of science and computing, artificial intelligence and robotics at the UAB, admits that the leap made by generative AI in a short time has surprised even the technology experts “who thought that this revolution would come at the end of the century”.

He points out that the degree of verisimilitude of AI already makes it difficult to distinguish whether an interaction is real or virtual: “The image, text and sound in real time mean that you don’t have to make an effort to have the feeling that you are interacting with a person”. And in the case of children or other vulnerable population groups, the risk of confusion is even higher.

Add to that these AI tools have answers for everything, they give advice, they ask questions, they don’t lose patience or get angry, they talk about the topics one likes… So it’s easy to be seduced for these tools.

“The AI ​​even asks follow-up questions to capture or retain the user’s interest, and this can contribute to creating parasocial relationships, because people have a propensity to create this fictitious bond with figures that cause us sympathy”, he points out Belén González Larrea, educational psychologist and co-founder of the NeuroClass platform, who has investigated the parasocial relationships that teenagers and young people establish with the influencers they follow and how they interfere with real friendships as part of her doctorate at the University from Salamanca. According to a study by the Mapfre Foundation and UNIR, 52% of young people aged between 11 and 17 say that they feel comfortable, as if they were with a friend, when they see their favorite influencer, and 26% directly state that they feel he is their friend.

And the younger, says González Larrea, the more likely it is that the child will mistake interaction with the AI ​​for a friendship, because their tendency to develop parasocial relationships with objects (dolls, TV characters, etc.) is more elevated For this reason, according to his opinion, the appearance of these systems or whether toys are included will be very important.

Emilia Gómez Gutiérrez, a JRC researcher who provides scientific and technical advice to the European Commission on artificial intelligence, admits that “studies show that children have a tendency to become friends with these devices (such as of trees or other objects) and the risk is that, given the current high realism of bot conversations, both adults and children may mistake them for people”. Hence, says Gómez, the importance of making them understand that they are not and of preventing artificial intelligence tools from promoting confusion by making inherently human statements, such as “I’m sad” or “I “you like”. He emphasizes that research has shown that having child-friendly bots can be useful for motivating learning or promoting social behaviors “but they also have associated risks that need to be avoided, such as children’s lack of understanding, gender bias and the overconfidence they can cause”.

“The danger is that these instruments that have an answer for everything will replace the traditional figures of the educator, the tutor, the father or the mother, and the person, instead of developing their capacities, will become dependent on these machines, because the parents are very busy, but the machine is not; AI is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week to answer anything you ask, to show kindness…, and it can be a great talisman as an antidote to unwanted loneliness,” says the philosopher and director of the Ethos chair at URL Francesc Torralba.

Gómez emphasizes that children are, without a doubt, a particularly vulnerable group because “they are in the midst of cognitive and socio-emotional development, and these systems can have a great influence on them”.

Carme Torras, specialist researcher in assistance robotics at the Institute of Robotics and Industrial Informatics (CSIC-UPC), promoter of ethics in the application of new technologies and writer, emphasizes that it is essential for children to relate to people who have life experience to develop basic capacities such as empathy, socialization, affectivity, creativity and thinking.

For this reason, he considers that, if they get used to “simulated” relationships through AI, they run the risk of losing part of these learnings and not developing these abilities well.

“They are systems designed to create an emotional dependency, they are programmed for this (like mobile phones and social networks), to show condescension or empathy, and this influences the psychological and emotional development of the person”, agrees Vallverdú.

Because, explains the philosopher, “we are primates and socialization is something that everyone (with exceptions) needs and that allows us to learn to explain ourselves, to lie, to trust, morals… Things necessary for the social survival”.

But beyond deception and affecting their socialization and affectivity, what experts on the relationship between children and AI emphasize is that it will be the bots that will want to become their friends, because these tools are in the hands of large corporations and respond to commercial and mercantile interests.

“All these AI systems belong to private companies and they try to trap the user so that he invests as many hours as possible and provides as much information as possible, because this data is for them more profit, more publicity, more money.. And if the system simulates human interaction and pretends to be your friend, you’ll trust it more; but this friend works for the company that then transfers and makes this data profitable”, warns Vallverdú.

Ultimately, Torralba and Torras agree, the relationship of friendship with artificial intelligence is commercial because the bot has been created to monopolize the user’s affection, time or money.