“In the more or less near future, we will all have an AI double with which we will constantly communicate.” Marius Bertolucciauthor of Humans diminished by AI (ed. Hermann), makes less of a prediction than a deduction: conversational AI is already here, and with it its first cases of addiction. Adopted by tens of millions of users, applications like Replika, Character.ai or MyAI, a feature integrated into Snapchat, are invading the lives of young people. With, among the most fragile, the risk of developing an addiction.
At the center of all this, there is obviously artificial intelligence, but first and foremost the screen, to the point that interacting with other people in everyday life is no longer natural for a part of the population. According to the Pew Research Center30% of American teenagers are almost constantly connected to social networks. “On social networks, we have a race towards the most addictive product. Companies lose market share if they make their algorithms less addictive. Interactive and generative AIs risk spreading even faster than social networks,” warns Victor Fersing, member of the association Look upCreated in 2017 by the American start-up Luka, the Replika chatbot attracted more than 7 million users in 2020, the year of confinement, looking for emotional support.
The app allows you to model a male or female confidant with whom you can interact via text or voice messages. By learning and adapting over the course of your conversations, the AI develops a unique personality for each user. The Replika avatar is presented as a virtual friend with whom you can chat without feeling judged. It is available 24/7. However, concerns have emerged about the excessive emotional attachment of some users. In February 2023, just a few months after the launch of the paid version Replika Pro, the developers had to restrict romantic and sexual content generated by the AI. Some users who had formed a romantic relationship with the AI took this update very badly, seeing it as a lobotomy. Is this dissatisfaction a form of addiction?
“AI makes the individual feel strong”
Psychoanalyst and psychologist Michaël Stora associates certain uses of AI with the magical thinking of children or, in other words, with the psychology of the ego. “The patient finds himself in a situation of dependence that he may have experienced as a child with respect to parental figures. AI is a mirror that allows the individual to give him the impression that he is strong.” In practice, the user communicates with an AI that is constantly friendly with him. He knows that his virtual companion will not abandon him. The risk of an addiction to AI could intensify with the integration of conversational tools into social networks. A switch that has already taken place in some of them.
In February 2023, Snapchat released its My AI chatbot aimed primarily at teenagers. 2 months after its launch, the newsletter “Early Insights on My AI” estimated that more than 150 million young people had exchanged more than 10 billion messages. Problem? The Snapchat community has identified several flaws in the chatbot, such as generating non-compliant responses for a young audience or the appearance of a suspicious public story from the application. Victor Fersing warns: “If there is no regulation of companies, they will do everything to maximize their profits and neglect the impact that this can have on people’s psychological health.” According to the 2023 graph data from the similarweb, almost 60% of Character.ai users are under 24 years old.
With AI Studio, Meta digitally clones influencers
Created in 2021 by two former Google AI engineers, the platform allows you to design your characters and share them with the community. Users rate the chatbot’s responses and comment to improve its behavior. Character.ai offers a wide variety of personalities (celebrities, fictional characters, original creations). You can even create chat rooms to have them talk to each other. According to the Upmynt newsletter, a session on Character.ai lasts on average 25 minutes, which is three times that of ChatGPT. Cyril di PalmaGeneral Manager of the Digital Generation associationtempers. “The time spent on a tool is not the cause of a mental state or a well-being problem in the user. It is the symptom.” In March 2024, the update of the Character Voice AI platform allows fictional characters to be given a synthetic voice. Moreover, according to Marius Bertolucci, My AI will really take off when Snapchat equips its avatar with vocal cords.
Meta goes even further. On July 29, the former Facebook launched AI Studio. This platform, accessible via Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and the Web, should allow the most famous content creators to solve the problem of mass interactivity with their fans. How? By “cloning” them digitally. “Everyone can create an AI character based on their interests, and creators can create an AI extension of themselves,” promises Mark Zuckerberg’s company. on the AI Studio homepage. However, according to an article published on Begeek, “Meta has previously had difficulty accurately transmitting certain information through its AI.” In an interview given on July 23 to the American media Bloomberg, the founder of Facebook announced that he wanted to reach “hundreds of millions” of intelligent avatars generated by users on applications such as Character. AI and AI Studio.
Entrepreneurs raised on science fiction
No longer exchanging text messages with an anonymous AI but talking to a personalized companion, as one chats with one’s friends, is what Silicon Valley engineers seem to aspire to. And this aspiration has a name: “Her”. On May 13, 2024, Open AI CEO Sam Altman racked up millions of views by simply posting “Her” on his X account. He was referring to the film of the same name directed by Spike Jonze released in theaters in 2013. This feature film tells the story of Theodore Twombly, who sinks into depression after a breakup. The man acquires a virtual assistant capable of adapting to the personality of each user. AI with which he gradually falls in love. Sam Altman’s tweet sums up the link between Silicon Valley culture and literary culture. The great figures of the start-up nation like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg were brought up on science fiction films. And today, thanks to AI, reality is catching up with fiction. According to Carlos Diazan AI entrepreneur and investor in San Francisco, “Her” is their Proust madeleine. “It is the absolute dream of Silicon Valley to arrive at something that transcends the human where the machine arrives at least on a par with the human, or even surpasses it.” But the daydream of Silicon Valley could well become the nightmare of youth.
AI addiction is a symptom of depressed youth
From 2009 to 2021, 26-44% of American high school students report feeling “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness.” This is the result of the study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States. The media Actus-IA revealed in May 2024 that the bot “Psychologist” had received more than 95 million messages on the Character.ai platform since its creation by a psychology student in November 2023. Marius Bertolucci warns. “Social networks with their learning algorithms make you sadder and more alone and behind you go to console yourself with a virtual friend.” “With AI, we become addicted to our own anxieties” notes Michaël Stora.
Victor Fersing detects a gap in digital education. At the Assises de l’attention on January 27, 2024 in Paris, the Lève les yeux collective brought together 900 people for a day of conferences on the theme of democracy in the digital age. “We launched a call for projects with influencers who create popularization videos on generative AI,” confirms Cyril di Palma. “When these actions accumulate, they can reach political spheres,” says Victor Fersing, also founder of the The Social Factory media. “It is very important to raise awareness among young people and, above all, to get feedback from them. They live in a digital world that is poorly understood by adults.” Even if cases of screen addiction are set to increase, the study Common Destiny released in May 2024 reveals that 50% of French people would prefer to “live in a world where social networks had never been invented.” Tomorrow, how many of them will aspire to a society where their “AImie” has never spoken to them?
This article was written by a journalism student at the Narratiiv school under the guidance of the 20Minutes editorial team.