It's really fascinating because, you know, there genuinely is a loneliness epidemic and there is like a lack of care and access to care.

But you are having trillion-dollar companies go into this market in a way that at least we can all say there's no oversight, right?

Yeah. we can all say there's no oversight, right? Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Natasha Tiku.

Natasha is a technology reporter at The Washington Post, and I wanted to have her on this

week because she wrote a really great story recently about the chatbots that are increasingly

proliferating through our lives that so many people are interacting with. And the consequences

that have come of using these things that the companies often do not want to talk so much about

and that we're probably not seeing as much reporting on as we really should. I think I should

premise this by saying that our conversation is going to sound a bit grim and a bit negative,

right? In part, that is because

we are not really interested in talking about, you know, the ways that people are benefiting

from these technologies or, you know, enjoying using them because, you know, we hear a ton about

those things. What we're talking about is what seems to be at the moment a small percentage of users,

but that's still a large number of users in the aggregate when you think about the number of people who are engaging with these generative AI tools and chatbots who are having really negative consequences from this, right?

They're overrelying on it because of maybe, you know, making up for a lack of social situations in the rest of their lives.

They're potentially quite lonely. And we're seeing the chatbots after they are conversing with

them for quite some time, start to churn out some outputs that can be quite concerning, right?

And that can encourage them to take actions that are going to be harmful to themselves and

potentially other people, which is not

to say that the chatbots are becoming sentient and starting to think about how they can

manipulate humans or anything like that, but rather just a recognition that these tools are

...