What practical benefits social AI can offer

AI therapists and caregivers. Digital tutors and advisors and friends. Artificial lovers. Griefbots trained to imitate dead loved ones. Welcome, to the bustling world of AI-powered chatbots. This was once the stuff of science fiction, but it's becoming just the stuff of everyday life. What will these systems do to our society, to our relationships, to our social skills and motivations? Are these bots destined to leave us hollowed out, socially stunted, screen-addicted, and wary of good-old-fashioned, in-the-flesh human interaction? Or could they actually be harnessed for good?

My guest today is Dr. Henry Shevlin. Henry is a philosopher and AI ethicist at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI) at Cambridge University. In a series of recent papers, Henry has been exploring this brave new world of "social AI" and its philosophical, ethical, and psychological dimensions.

Here, Henry and I sketch the current landscape of social AI—from dedicated platforms like Replika and CharacterAI to the more subtly social uses of ChatGPT and Claude. We consider several tragic cases that have recently rocketed these kinds of services into public awareness. We talk about what's changed about AI systems—quite recently—that’s now made them capable of sustained relationships. We linger on the possible risks of social AI and, perhaps less obviously, on the possible benefits. And we consider the prospects for regulation. Along the way, Henry and I also talk about his 81-year-old father, his teenage self, and, of course, the kids these days; we consider whether social AI, in its potential harms, is more like social media or more like violent video games; we talk about "deskilling" and it's opposite "upskilling"; and we of course take stock of a certain elephant in the room.

Alright friends, this is a fun one. We've been wanting to explore this dawning age of social AI for some time. And we finally found, in Henry, the right person to do it with. Enjoy!

Notes

3:00 – The piece in The Guardian—'It's time to prepare for AI personhood'—by Jacy Reece Anthis.

5:00 – The Replika subreddit. 

9:30 – News coverage of recent research on the bedside manner of AI systems.

10:30 – For a recent paper on AI by the philosopher Ophelia Deroy, see here.

11:30 – For some of Dr. Shevlin's recent writing about "social AI", see here and here.

13:30 – OpenAI’s recent report, 'How People Use ChatGPT'.

16:30 – For examples of popular media coverage of recent (tragic) cases involving chatbots, see here, here, here, and here.

21:00 – The paper by Rose Guingrich and Michael Graziano on how users describe their relationships with chatbots.

24:00 – The precise quote by Mark Twain is: “Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.”

25:30 – The classic paper on Mary’s room by Frank Jackson.

27:00 – Dr. Shevlin has also worked on questions about animal minds (e.g., here), as well as a number of issues in AI beyond “social AI” (e.g., here, here).

30:00 – The classic essay by Isaiah Berlin on hedgehogs and foxes.

32:00 – The classic paper on ELIZA, introduced by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966. A version of ELIZA that you can interact with. For work by Sherry Turkle, see here.

34:00 – Dr. Shevlin’s recent paper about the “anthropomimetic turn” in contemporary AI.

41:00 – For recent work on whether current chatbots pass a version of the Turing test, see here. 

45:00 – Ted Chiang’s story, ‘The Lifecycle of Software Objects,’ was re-published as part his collection of short fiction, Exhalation.

46:00 – For Dr. Shevlin’s recent writing on machine consciousness, see here.

48:00 – For more on the possibility of consciousness in borderline cases (like AI systems), see our past episodes here and here.

52:00 – The study on whether people attribute consciousness to LLMs.

54:30 – A recent paper on griefbots by scholars at the University of Cambridge. A popular article about the phenomenon.

55:30 – A blogpost describing the so-called DigiDan experiment.

1:00:00 – Some of the potentially positive social qualities of AIs are discussed in this essay by Paul Bloom. 

1:19:30 – For more on Iain Banks’ culture series, see here.

1:20:30 – A popular article on the phenomenon of hikikomori.

Recommendations

The Oxford Intersections: AI in Society collection

The new podcast, Our Lives with Bots

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd.

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com.

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).