Millions of people use AI companion apps. These bots are always available and supportive, so it is hard for people to give them up. But a bot is just a service provided by a company that profits from your emotions. Also, a bot is an empty vessel. The author calls AI companions the perfect digital opium. But if people get addicted, they can lose their connection with real people.
The author says that we should not trust AI blindly, because it often makes mistakes. For example, Zillow overpaid for 27,000 homes and lost more than 300 million dollars. In another case, a car manufacturer’s chatbot sold a car for 1 dollar. And Amazon used AI to hire employees, but it was trained on old data where most of the candidates were men, so it gave lower scores to women’s résumés. AI can be very useful, but it is not perfect
