Hey, this is Radio Lab. I'm Latif Nasser. So recently, you may have seen just a rash of headlines

about people using artificial intelligence for their mental health. There are all these

therapists, bots, and just even people using regular chat bots to help them find solutions to their

problem, to calm them down, to, just looking for somebody

to even just to listen. And I don't know. I'm not sure what to think of any of it for a lot of

different reasons, but partially because the AI doesn't know anything. It's just taking an unimaginable amount of our words,

scrambling them up and generating something relevant and helpful,

and maybe even intelligent seeming,

but it doesn't actually know what any of those words mean.

Ultimately, all it's doing is parroting our language back at us. And yet, I know a lot of people

find it very helpful to talk to. All of that got me to thinking about a very different story that we

made here at the show years ago, a story where similarly a person who needs help is helped by something.

And it's unclear if that something really knows how it's helping or whether it's helping.

We originally heard this back in 2011, so it was years before ChatGPT.

But it's sort of a low-tech way of doing the same thing,

of parroting your language back to you to help you.

So today I want to play that story for you.

Here it is.

A flock of two.

Wait, you're listening.

Okay.

All right.

...