Artificial intelligence is slowly creeping its way into daily life.

It's not just people using it for work. Some people are turning to it for therapy.

Others are looking to it for medical diagnosis.

Some are starting to regard it as a replacement for talking to a friend.

But this is all raising concerns over whether this could lead to a new type of social pathogen,

something that may deepen the darker parts of human nature.

I'll be deep diving into this topic in today's episode.

I'm the Epic Times Senior Investigator reporter Joshua Phillip, and you're listening to Crossroads.

Artificial intelligence is very slowly, now very rapidly, creeping its way into daily life. And it's actually not just people using it for work anymore.

Some people are turning it to refer therapy. Others are looking to it for diagnosis for medical problems. Some are starting to regard it as a replacement for talking to a friend.

None of this recommended, by the way, but this is all raising additional concerns

of whether this could lead to a new type of social pathogen, something that could even deepen the darker parts of human nature.

Now, it's just one part of what's now coming up to the surface and how people turn to AI.

There's the issue of how the systems actually work.

Now, they're of course programmed. They're not purely machine run.

There are people behind them and they're intentionally limiting them in different ways or making them react in certain ways. There are companies behind them that have intentionally in some areas made them react to people the way they want them to.

And some of the methods they're using coming to the surface now, if a person were to do this in a normal social interaction,

you would normally deem it a type of intentional manipulation.

It would be like a dark psychology type stuff.

The machines are doing this.

A type of manipulative sycophancy, right?

Telling someone whatever they want to hear, for example, in order to gain advantage over them.

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