Of course, we all know AI chatbots aren't human, don't we?

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carrino. Advancements in AI have made it possible for the technology to mimic humans in ever more convincing ways.

But even far less sophisticated tools than today's chatbots have been shown in research to trick our brains, in a sense, into projecting human thought

processes and emotions onto these systems. It's a cognitive failure that can leave people open

to deception and manipulation, which makes the increasingly human-like technologies proliferating

in our daily lives particularly dangerous, according to Rick

Claypool. He's a research director at the nonprofit Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy

organization. Well, so the human mind is naturally inclined to believe that something that we

can speak with must be human too, or human-like in that it has, you know, has a,

has a mind behind what it is. And younger people, people who are psychologically vulnerable

for any number of reasons are sort of more susceptible to being, you know, drawn in to this.

And even looking at the story that the New York Times reporter

Kevin Ruse wrote on the early version of Bing and his interactions with it and how it professed

love and tried to talk him into, you know, leaving his wife and all that kind of thing.

Just having that kind of intense conversation is surprising.

And you could tell from the story he wrote about it, left him feeling pretty, you know, reeling and then dumbfounded.

Tell me more about the risks inherent to interacting with technology in this way.

So there are a range of risks associated with anthropomorphic AI systems, right?

And they also have a tendency to engage in what technologists sort of have called it the sort of a sycophantic risk,

the risk that the system is being designed to always validate rather than challenge what the

user is saying.

That gets more dangerous whenever you say things like,

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