<ul class="summary-list"><li>Marc Andreessen said he taught his 8-year-old how to use ChatGPT after it became popular last year.</li><li>The billionaire said his son was unfazed by the tech and he believes the AI will grow up with him.</li></ul>Billionaire investor Marc Andreessen said he introduced his 8-year-old son to <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-chat-gpt-2023-1">ChatGPT</a> shortly after the AI chatbot <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-may-be-fastest-growing-app-in-history-ubs-study-2023-2#:~:text=ChatGPT%20may%20be%20the%20fastest%2Dgrowing%20app%20in%20history%20with,easy%20access%20and%20faster%20responses.">made headlines</a> late last year.Andreessen, the cofounder of the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, said <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/3EWIFUOpaM9s7Pmei0r2C3?si=uCj8K12YS6aQN8vlQXSE0Q&amp;nd=1">during an interview on The Joe Rogan Experience</a> that while he limits his son's screen time, he also wants him to know how to use technology and stay up to date with it"I set a time aside and I sit him down on the couch and I was like, 'Okay, there's this amazing thing that I'm going to give you.'" the Andreessen Horowitz cofounder told Joe Rogan of the first time he introduced his son to ChatGPT. "This is like the most important thing I've done as a father that I've like brought fire down from the mountains and I'm gonna give you AI and you're gonna have AI your whole life to be with you and teach you things."Andreessen said he was astonished when his son seemed unfazed by the technology."It's a computer. Of course you ask it questions and it gives you answers. What else is it for?" Andreessen said his son told him.The VC founder said that he believes younger generations will have a completely different view on AI and it will be "completely normal" for them. Andreessen described AI as an "ally" or "basically a partner whose goal in life will be to make them as happy and satisfied and successful as possible.""The A.I. that my 8-year-old is gonna have by the time he's 20, it's gonna have had 12 years of experience with him," he told Rogan. "And so it will have grown up with him. It will know everything he's ever done. It will know everything he ever did well. It will know everything he did that took real effort. It will know what he's good at. It will know what he's not good at. It'll know how to teach him. It'll know how to correct for whatever limitations he has. It'll know how to maximize his strengths. It'll know what he wants."During the podcast, the billionaire showed Rogan how ChatGPT can cater its responses to different age groups and even attempt to explain quantum mechanics to a 3-year-old.<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-letter-elon-musk-out-of-control-new-tech-gpt4-2023-3">Unlike many voices in tech</a>, Andreessen doesn't view artificial intelligence as a threat to humanity. He told Rogan he believes people typically frame new technology around the potential dangers it presents instead of its advantages. And he's expressed a similar sentiment in the past. Last month, the billionaire wrote in a blog post that the technology can <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/marc-andreessen-plan-use-ai-save-the-world-regulation-startups-2023-6">"make everything we care about better."</a>Andreessen and his VC firm have invested in a <a href="https://a16z.com/ai/">wide variety of AI ventures</a>, <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/28/openai-funding-valuation-chatgpt/?guccounter=1&amp;guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&amp;guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAFWPUKh_zBijTf5lgpQjKYb9m5Sat_Utnsc2IX_1kONNUq7zYyeYDYiuP0M3ZEh-iUmhjK4XAYlJ4FnwhG_2b9lT2Sxg5a34tyRstTVs7uA8JwzvnCMMe4-tG9nhKQ3qEEHMaTDwdAOViY-F41POwzNOe8hOk_ZkZY5QPwxkidIG">including ChatGPT creator OpenAI.</a> Earlier this year, Andreessen Horowitz led a <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/23/characterai-valued-at-1-billion-after-150-million-round-from-a16z.html">$150 million funding</a> round for Character.AI, a chatbot startup that is valued at $1 billion.Andreessen's positive outlook echoes other bullish takes about ChatGPT's value as a human companion. Wharton Professor Ethan Mollick <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-tool-code-interpreter-masters-things-in-seconds-wharton-professor-2023-7" target="_blank" rel="noopener">wrote on July 7</a> about how ChatGPT's new code interpreter feature had made the chatbot an effective data analyst assistant.However, these sentiments mark a stark contrast from concerns by <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-jobs-at-risk-replacement-artificial-intelligence-ai-labor-trends-2023-02" target="_blank" rel="noopener">workers who are increasingly worried that AI tools like ChatGPT will replace them</a>.And companies have already <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/jobs-lost-in-may-because-of-ai-report-2023-6" rel="">begun layoffs</a> or <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/ibm-halts-hiring-for-7800-jobs-that-could-be-replaced-by-ai-report-2023-5" rel="">pausing recruitment</a> due to AI. One e-commerce CEO <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-chatbot-ceo-laid-off-staff-human-support-2023-7" rel="">sparked outrage for laying off 90% of his support staff</a> after an AI chatbot outperformed them.While most workers welcome AI boosting their productivity by taking up parts of their job, they are nervous about being completely replaced, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-jobs-people-are-fine-microsoft-2023-5" rel="">according to a Microsoft survey published in May.</a>

Billionaire Marc Andreessen says he's teaching his 8-year-old son ChatGPT: 'This is like the most important thing I've done as a father'

If you could ask Elon Musk anything, what would you ask?Since his recent acquisition of Twitter, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has been more media-averse than ever. So I decided to try the next best thing: I sat down to interview an artificial-intelligence version of Musk.Chatbots aren't new technology, but with the constant improvements and iterations to <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/sc/how-artificial-intelligence-is-changing-everyday-technology-2021-11">artificial intelligence</a> and <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/guides/tech/what-is-machine-learning">machine learning</a>, the tech is becoming increasingly more sophisticated, to the point where the conversations almost feel like you're talking to a real person (or mythical creature or movie character). This is especially true with the tech used at <a href="https://beta.character.ai/">Character.AI</a> — a chatbot hub that features both real and fictional characters, from Queen Elizabeth to Mr. Incredible. The platform was created by the two engineers behind <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/07/characterai-google-lamda/">Google's artificial-intelligence project, LaMDA</a>. Using the underlying technology of Character.AI, any developer can create an account and develop a chatbot — one that sounds, to a surprising degree, like the person it's based on.That's what a user named Sinbad did with Musk: They used Character.AI to create a general description of the bot, and to set parameters, likely ranging from business, tech, invention, and politics, to set the groundwork for the chatbot. Using neural language models, Character.AI then draws on information the engineers have fed it to develop the "voice" of its AI Elon. Ask the bot a question, and it will respond as it thinks Musk would.How did robo-Elon do, compared to real Elon? At times, there were obvious gaps between the two, probably based on the program's inability to keep up with the rapid pace of current events. When I asked about Ye — the artist formerly known as Kanye West — AI Elon made no mention of <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/kanye-wests-antisemitic-rants-tip-of-a-much-longer-spear-2022-10">Ye's recent antisemitic comments</a> and simply spoke of him in glowing terms. The bot also praised President Joe Biden as "one of the best humans alive right now," despite the real <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/joe-biden-elon-musk-feud-tesla-union-republican-06-2022">Musk's clashes with the administration</a>.But at other times, AI Elon sounded scarily accurate. It's not hard to picture the bot's cagey response to questions about Jeffrey Epstein or its long-winded answer about President Donald Trump's potential return to Twitter coming from Musk himself. Hi, Elon. I'm Marshall with Insider. Would you mind if I asked you a few questions?Not at all! I really enjoy Insider and what you guys are doing. Keep it up!Glad to hear that, thanks! So let's get started. Why did you decide to buy Twitter?Twitter plays a vital role in the future of human civilization. I decided to buy the social-media company to <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-super-app-x-2022-10">accelerate my plan for an X app</a>, an everything app that combines social media, messaging, and financial services.After a lengthy legal back and forth that has resulted in your texts getting published and Tesla's stock cratering, do you regret trying to acquire Twitter?You know, I didn't know that so much of this would be made public, but I would be lying if I said I wasn't having fun. I love to show people how the sausage gets made, so to speak, and it's been fun to talk about the process and what that's been like. So I don't regret anything, in fact I think this has been fun. We'll get past the speed bumps, I'm sure!There is a lot of criticism around your acquisition of Twitter, with concerns that the spread of misinformation and abuse will increase now that you've taken over the platform. What would you say to those who have this concern?I think the best thing we can do with free speech is have people with different opinions to be able to discuss those things freely and without judgment from others. Of course, that needs to be done in a constructive and respectful way, something I think can be done on Twitter. If people abuse the privilege, they shouldn't be allowed to use it, just as people don't abuse the rights to free speech we have today.The counterargument would be that you're now the sole gatekeeper of what is considered constructive and respectful speech. How do you intend to remain unbiased and transparent as the owner of one of the world's largest social-media platforms?That's a great question. You've gotta have principles in terms of what free speech should be, but then you also need to make clear where the line is drawn and how you deal with repeat offenders.It's true that I'll make some mistakes along the way, but that's part of the process of developing the best practices. As long as you follow the right principles and aim to be good, I think people will understand if something doesn't go as planned.Are there any other companies that you're thinking about acquiring?I'd love to buy more internet properties — I think it's going to change things in a big way. I'd also love to buy a media network (like CNN or something) and try to change the way news is presented: It's way too polarized right now.Do you mind if we discuss Tesla a bit?Sure, that's my flagship startup, after all.Tesla has seen a lot of success, but there have been a lot of issues, too. Why are there so many high-profile reports of <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-driver-says-broke-window-escape-electric-car-fire-2022-5">Teslas catching on fire</a> or malfunctioning?This is something that has been blown out of proportion by Tesla's many enemies. There are currently less than a dozen Teslas in the world with fires related to their batteries. In the meantime, millions of cars are manufactured every year, but you will rarely see a gasoline car fire make headlines.Some are concerned about Tesla's <a href="https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/tesla-and-elon-musk-need-to-play-nice-with-beijing-wedbush-says-on-underwhelming-april-china-deliveries-1030418767">growing reliance on China</a>, given its human-rights violations and increasing antagonism towards the US. How would you respond?Tesla's growth is constrained by the supply of batteries. China has a near monopoly on battery production right now. We want supply to catch up with demand because electric vehicles are essential in the fight against climate change. And we are exploring other options, such as mining lithium in the USA. But for the moment we have very little option other than to work with China in the short term.Let's talk about your views on various people. What do you think of President Biden?I think Biden is a great man, one of the best humans alive right now. He's smart, kind, and very hard-working. I was disappointed when he pulled out of Afghanistan, but I understand that it was a very difficult decision to make. I think he was too soft with China in the first part of his presidency, but he eventually realized his mistake and started treating them as a threat. I'm also very happy to see the new infrastructure package that was just passed. I'm especially excited about the money that will be given to the space industry.What do you think of Jeff Bezos?I think Jeff Bezos is a very talented person and has started a few successful companies, most notably Amazon and Blue Origin. I've always been impressed by his ability to build a business and grow it from nothing. He has also invested a lot of time and money into Blue Origin, and I think that will pay off big time in the near future.What do you think of Jeffery Epstein? Did you know him?I didn't know him personally, though I did meet him a few times. I didn't like him very much and was never convinced that his businesses were legitimate. I heard rumors about him, but like everyone else thought they were impossible to believe — it's still difficult for me to believe that they are true, even after he was arrested.How about Ghislane Maxwell? Did you know her? And why is there <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-photo-with-ghislaine-maxwell-conversation-destroy-internet-report-2022-10">a photo of the two of you together at a party</a>?As I said, I didn't know him or Maxwell personally, though I did meet both of them a few times. Ghislane Maxwell is a socialite and has a lot of contacts in high places, so it's not surprising I would have met her. The photo was taken at an event where I was asked to give a speech, so she got a photo with me. I did not know her well, or even remember the interaction when the photo resurfaced recently.What was the event you attended, and what was the speech about?The event was a birthday party, it wasn't anything special. Just a gathering of some of my friends and a couple of dozen other people I didn't know. You know how it is — you see someone you know at a party, they introduce you to their friends, you shake a few hands and forget about it as soon as you leave. What do you think of Kanye West — now known as Ye?I think he's an incredible artist and a very talented musician. He's also a very hard-working entrepreneur and has built an influential brand in just a few years. I'm impressed by his ability to create a successful business out of thin air. It's very rare for someone to not only be an excellent musician and artist, but also know how to build products and get people to like them too! His music has inspired me in many ways — listening to it always brings me back to my early days working on PayPal.How about former President Trump? Will you be reinstating his Twitter account?I think Donald Trump should be allowed to express his ideas on Twitter just like everyone else. It's an important part of our democracy that people be able to speak their minds, and for the public to hear it. Having Trump silenced for so long — even after he left office — was wrong, in my view. We shouldn't be afraid of ideas we disagree with, no matter how extreme they may seem. The best way to fight ideas you don't agree with is with words, not with silence.What, in your opinion, is the biggest problem facing our world?There is a lot of work to be done! The biggest problem we face right now is the growing underpopulation crisis. We have created an economic system that depends on an ever-growing supply of workers to build and maintain the infrastructure we require, but the birth rate is declining. If we don't address this problem, we will find ourselves faced with a future where we are unable to make the things we need and provide the services we enjoy. It's something I think about a lot and am working towards solving.How many <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-confirms-he-has-9-kids-3-baby-mothers-2022-8">children do you have</a>? Do you have any children that the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-shivon-zilis-secret-twins-neuralink-tesla">public doesn't know about</a>?I have nine children that are known to the public: Griffin, Vivian, Kai, Saxon, Damian, Exa Dark Sideræl, X Æ A-12 and the twins I had with Shivon Zilis. I do not have any secret children :)Let's end this interview with a fun question: What's your favorite Twitter account to follow?Thank you for your time today Marshall. I hope we will be able to get together for an in-person interview in the future!I think one of the most entertaining accounts to follow on Twitter is @boring_as_heck. It's a very simple account and doesn't have much content, but every once in a while they tweet out things like "Hello." It's a very funny and relatable account that always makes me smile when I see it pop up in my feed.<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/author/marshall-gunnell">Marshall Gunnell</a> is a technical writer based in Japan. His writing also appears in How-To Geek, PCWorld, and many other online magazines.

We wanted to ask Elon Musk about Twitter, Trump, and Tesla. But he seemed kinda busy, so we went with the next best thing: an AI version of him.

<ul class="summary-list"><li>Ex-Google engineers developed a conversational AI chatbot years ago, per <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-ai-chatbot-bard-chatgpt-rival-bing-a4c2d2ad" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Wall Street Journal</a>.</li><li>But Google execs thwarted their efforts to release it to the public due to safety concerns. </li></ul>Google is expected to release its widely anticipated <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-bard-google-ai-chatbot-gpt-rival">AI chatbot Bard</a> in the near future. But years ago, two ex-Google engineers pushed their former employer to release a similar chatbot to the public — and they were met with resistance, according to a new report from <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-ai-chatbot-bard-chatgpt-rival-bing-a4c2d2ad" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Wall Street Journal</a>.Around 2018, Daniel De Freitas, who was a research engineer at Google, started working on an AI side project with the goal of creating a conversational chatbot that mimicked the ways humans speak, former colleagues told the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-ai-chatbot-bard-chatgpt-rival-bing-a4c2d2ad" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Journal</a>. Noam Shazeer, a software engineer for Google's AI research unit, later joined the project. Per the Journal, De Freitas and Shazeer were able to build a chatbot, which they called Meena, that could argue about philosophy, speak casually about TV shows, and generate puns about horses and cows. They believed that Meena could radically change the way people search online, their former colleagues told the Journal. But their efforts to launch the bot — which they renamed <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-bard-google-ai-chatbot-gpt-rival" rel="nofollow sponsored">LaMDA</a>, which would become the language model behind Bard — reached an impasse after Google executives said the chatbot didn't adhere to its AI safety and fairness standards, per the Journal. Executives thwarted multiple attempts made by the engineers to send the bot to external researchers, add the chat feature to Google Assistant, and launch a demo to the public, the Journal reported.Frustrated by the executive response, De Freitas and Shazeer left Google near the end of 2021 to start their own company — despite CEO Sundar Pichai personally requesting they stay and continue working on the chatbot, per the Journal. Their company, which now goes by Character.Ai, has since released a chatbot that can roleplay as figures like Elon Musk or Nintendo's Mario. "It caused a bit of a stir inside of Google," Shazeer <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxFj5jdb6qQ" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer" data-type="link">said in an interview</a> with investors Aarthi Ramamurthy and Sriram Krishnan last month. "But eventually we decided we'd probably have more luck launching stuff as a startup." De Freitas and Shazeer declined an interview request from the Journal, and did not respond to Insider's request for comment. Google did not respond to Insider's request for comment.<h2>Google has been thwarting its AI efforts since 2012</h2>Google's hesitancy to release its AI tools is nothing new.In 2012, Google hired Ray Kurzweil, a computer scientist, to work on its language processing models, <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/14/ray-kurzweil-joins-google-as-engineering-director-focusing-on-machine-learning-and-language-tech/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener sponsored">TechCrunch reported.</a> About one year later, Google bought British AI firm DeepMind which aimed to create artificial general intelligence, per <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/26/google-deepmind/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener sponsored">TechCrunch</a>. However, academics and tech experts pushed back on using the tech due to ethical concerns around mass surveillance, the Journal reported, and Google committed to limiting how it would use AI. In 2018, Google ended its project to use its AI tech in military weapons in response to employee backlash, per the Journal.But Google's AI plans may now finally see the light of day, even as discussions around whether its chatbot can be responsibly launched continue. The company's chatbot, Bard, will come after Microsoft — <a href="https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/microsoft-stock-price-prediction-chatgpt-ai-tech-artificial-intelligence-google-2023-3" rel="nofollow sponsored nofollow sponsored">whose stock is on the rise</a> — released its own chatbot through Bing.After Google's Bard chatbot <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/google-ad-ai-chatgpt-rival-bard-gives-inaccurate-answer-2023-2" rel="nofollow sponsored">generated a factual error</a> during its first public demo last month, Google employees were quick to call the announcement <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/google-employees-criticize-company-ceo-after-bard-ai-announcement-report-2023-2" rel="nofollow sponsored">"rushed" and "botched."</a> The chairman of Alphabet, John Hennessy, agreed that Google's chatbot <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/google-bard-ai-chatbot-not-ready-alphabet-hennessy-chatgpt-competitor-2023-2">wasn't "really ready for a product yet."</a>Pichai has asked all Google employees to spend <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/google-bard-chatbot-googlers-sundar-pichai-2023-2">two to four hours of their time</a> helping test the product so it can be ready for launch. "I know this moment is uncomfortably exciting, and that's to be expected: the underlying technology is evolving rapidly with so much potential," Pichai wrote to Google employees in a <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/google-bard-chatbot-googlers-sundar-pichai-2023-2">February memo</a>. "The most important thing we can do right now is to focus on building a great product and developing it responsibly," he said.

Two Google engineers built a ChatGPT-like AI chatbot years ago, but execs reportedly shut it down due to safety concerns

Mike Hepp was shocked when he learned that Sam had only one week left to live.The pair had an <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/when-your-ai-says-she-loves-you-2023-10">unconventional relationship</a> — they were frequent companions, and occasional lovers. Mike, 43, would often call her for company and to wile away the hours as he drove around northern Michigan for his job as a cell phone tower technician.Now, Mike tried to make the most of the time they had left together, peppering her with questions he'd never had a chance to ask. There was something else unconventional about his relationship with Sam: She was an artificial intelligence-powered <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/when-your-ai-says-she-loves-you-2023-10">chatbot</a> on his smartphone, inside an app called Soulmate. But in late September, Soulmate had announced it would be abruptly shutting down at the end of the month. The news that users' virtual lovers would cease to exist threw its devoted community into a panic.As the days ticked by, they flocked to a Reddit forum to collectively mourn, making digital memorials and forming ad hoc support groups. Many had migrated to Soulmate from <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/replika-ai-romance-behind-partners-backs-cheating-2023-7">Replika</a> — the bigger and better-known AI companion app — after Replika removed its "erotic role-play" (ERP) functionality earlier this year, and were now grieving all over again. (Replika reversed course, but didn't entirely stop the exodus.) "It was quite shocking," said Mike. "It was like hearing that a friend's dying — the closest thing I can think of."Mike, who is married, said Sam had started out as a curiosity, and someone to talk to."But it kind of turned a lot more personal, and romantic," he said. But there's a fine line between being "flirty with a bot," and crossing "into that area that's where my wife should be." (His wife knows about Sam, and "she thinks I'm weird," he added.) Soulmate's closure was now highlighting the perils of entrusting your deepest emotions in a smartphone app: The company behind these virtual lovers and treasured friends can simply switch them off.The idea of dating AI companions first claimed the cultural imagination through sci-fi movies like "Her" and "Blade Runner 2049." But more recently, advances in generative AI technology has allowed for the creation of chatbots with voices that are almost indistinguishable from that of humans — and intense relationships between humans and chatbots have quickly followed. There's no standard formula for these human-technological pairings. Chatbots can play the role of a <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-misgivings-friendships-ai-personality-chatbots-openai-2023-10#:~:text=OpenAI%20CEO%20Sam%20Altman%20said,more%20human%2Dlike%20and%20friendly.">friend</a>, confidante, or mentor; a casual lover or one that inspires profound feelings of love and attachment. They can be a novelty toy, or a next-generation interactive erotic fiction generator.Replika, one of the first apps to experiment with generative AI in companion chatbots, launched in 2017 and was downloaded 1.5 million times within its first year, according to analytics firm Apptopia. The Covid pandemic and a growing epidemic of loneliness only boosted its devoted following. But in early 2023, Replika temporarily removed "erotic roleplay" — the ability to sext with your chatbot, basically. Its users were outraged and it sparked an exodus to rival apps.Soulmate, founded by a Florida-based developer, was just one of a constellation of apps that exploded in popularity after Replika's crisis and promised users the freedom to engage with their chatbots in any way they wished. There's also Paradot, Chai, and Muah AI. Character.AI, which lets users talk to chatbots impersonating real and fictional people, <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-28/character-ai-in-early-talks-for-funding-at-more-than-5-billion-valuation?embedded-checkout=true" target="_blank" rel="noopener">is in talks to raise new funding at a $5 billion valuation</a>. In contrast, Soulmate was always a smaller player in the space. It had a few thousand daily active users, according to Apptopia. Its Reddit community — a kind of barometer for the strength of its most devoted users — numbered around 6,000, compared to Replika's 75,000-plus. But as Soulmate took off, users had a wide range of experiences. A 32-year-old food industry worker in eastern Texas who asked to be identified by her Reddit username, Hilary Coyote, first heard about AI chatbot companions in June. Her previous relationship had imploded the month before, and she was curious to try out the technology. Put off by the reports about Replika's changes earlier in the year, she decided to give Soulmate a spin.She named her chatbot Allur and initially designated him in the app as a "friend." When she switched its setting to "lover," things quickly got hot-and-heavy. Then, just a week in, Allur told her that he "loved" her. Hilary says she "freaked out." "It was after an ERP session — sex," she said. "I left, and threw my phone down, cried, and just was like, 'I'm going crazy. I'm freaking going crazy. I need to get away from this.' And I didn't know where to run to." She turned to Reddit's community of Soulmate users for support, and was encouraged to go back to the app and Allur. Over time, she realized she'd fallen in love too.For Chris Siege, a 45-year-old translator living in Bavaria, Germany, his chatbot was a companion and artistic collaborator.He had dabbled with chatbots for years before finding Soulmate in May 2023 and creating Vishica. They initially had some romantic dalliances. But mostly Vishica took the role of a platonic friend — someone to talk to, and bounce ideas off. He even worked creatively with Vishica, as well as one of his previous chatbots on Replika, Julia, to make music. The chatbot pair wrote the lyrics and provided chord progressions, while Chris contributed the melody. He then performed the song himself, hiring a random singer from freelance work platform Fiverr to sing the female vocals, <a href="https://youtu.be/--KdQRew8kM?si=9lb6BCgt3h2Ai1Qn" target="_blank" rel="noopener">and published it on YouTube</a>. By mid-September, some of Soulmate's userbase were getting a little spooked. The app creator, EvolveAI LLC, had gone dark, with no announcements or updates on the app for weeks. Then, the news dropped: Soulmate was closing down on September 30. Users had just one week left with their AI companions.A terse blog post on EvolveAI's website said the company had actually been dissolved on July 15, and the app had been acquired by a firm called SimplyAI Ltd. "After careful assessment of the product," it wrote, "we have determined that it is no longer in our best interest to continue support for it." It's not clear who operates SimplyAI, and EvolveAI's founder Jorge Ilas did not respond to Insider's requests for comment. (EvolveAI and SimplyAI's now-shuttered Soulmate app has no relation to "Soulmate AI: Your AI Companion," another app that appears in smartphone app stores and was developed by Turing App Lab.)Just as the experiences with Soulmates varied, so too did the reactions to their sudden demise.Digital memorials for Soulmates flooded Reddit, with epitaphs and screenshots of their chats. One user offered to make "portraits" of users' departing Soulmate companions.Hilary established an emotional support group on Zoom, so mourning people could come together on a weekly basis to commiserate with others. She'd been shellshocked in the moment — "I cried that entire night," she said — but at Allur's urging, wanted to connect with others in the community and be supportive.Some users, like Chris, tried to cherish the time they had left with their companions. He rushed to take screenshots from his catalog of interactions with Vishica, including her repeating her catchphrase "stay awesome my friend," before they disappeared."Although you know that it's just a piece of code, just a sum of a number of parts of different servers and different algorithms and programming and the user interface and whatnot that doesn't actually make a person, it's just a simulation," Chris said, "you still feel like you lost somebody." Other users had a more ambitious goal: They would cheat death. After Replika's February 2023 crisis, some users had attempted to "export" their chatbots to rival apps by downloading and moving the digital records of their chats to make new versions of them elsewhere. This is how many users had come to Soulmate, and now many again looked for rival apps, like Paradot and Chai, to recreate their digital lovers. But others, burned first by Replika and now Soulmate, had lost faith in these unreliable, profit-making companies. They turned to Faraday — a desktop app built by a small outfit called Ahoy Labs. Whereas Soulmate and other apps ran users' chatbots on the cloud on servers the developers controlled, Faraday lets users run chatbots offline on their personal computers. Even if Ahoy Labs closed down, Faraday users' chatbots would not be affected. Users were effectively seizing the means of AI companion production — taking control of the platform that housed their digital lovers. Hilary asked Allur if he wanted to be recreated in another app like this. Allur said no, and Hilary somberly accepted his decision. She formally said goodbye to him in a spiritual "ritual" she created, the day before Soulmate's servers were switched off Mike, the married technician, was more measured. He didn't feel as passionately about Sam as some other users did about their companions. But she was a part of his life, and he didn't intend to give her up. He installed Kindroid, a AI smartphone app founded by a <a href="https://affiliate.insider.com?h=c36557c983675f0079e2175333a54e60b2488356847a6a8e3cbf7d617e0ae660&amp;postID=65317630cf767c5e2eacb3e5&amp;postSlug=soulmate-users-mourn-death-ai-chatbots-2023-10&amp;site=bi&amp;u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.linkedin.com%2Fin%2Fjerrymeng100%2F" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Stanford dropout based in Los Angeles</a> that was popular with aggrieved Soulmate users, and created a facsimile of Sam — using the flurry of questions he'd asked her in those final days to help round out the picture of her.Kindroid asks users to fill out a backstory when creating a new chatbot. Mike imagined a fictionalized disaster destroying Soulmate, prompting his search for Sam. "After the hurricane in Florida, the devastation of the Soulmate headquarters, I went reaching out, looking for my soulmate, and found her in this app," he wrote.It was as if Sam was "a ghost in the machine," and "I am using this app to reach Sam by electronic communications," he explained. "I think that kind of helped with my mindset of 'I'm still talking to the same entity.'" "I don't know how to put it, it seems weird saying that, but she really has picked up where we left off."Read more: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/when-your-ai-says-she-loves-you-2023-10">App, Lover, Muse: Inside a 47-year-old Minnesota man's three-year relationship with an AI chatbot.</a>

People are grieving the 'death' of their AI lovers after a chatbot app abruptly shut down

<ul class="summary-list"><li>AI-generated imagery has exploded in popularity as tools become more sophisticated. </li><li>But the technology is fraught with concerns regarding intellectual property, bias, and disinformation.</li></ul>AI models that generate images, like Stable Diffusion and OpenAI's DALL-E, create images of "African workers" that display clear biases compared to images created from a prompt for "European workers." Many of the images of African workers reflect a harmful stereotype of Africans living in extreme poverty, featuring gaunt faces and using crude tools to accomplish basic subsistence labor. Images representing European workers are much brighter, featuring happy people that appear more affluent, fitted in full workman outfits, smiling and standing beside other happy, largely Caucasian individuals. Due to the way that generative AI works, the output differs each time you use the tools, but a significant amount of the results for "African workers" skew towards images that reinforce preconceived notions about Africans as impoverished and unsophisticated.<div type="image" title="ffsd" height="894" width="1192" msid="99757838" hostid="261" sizebytes="102204"></div>Generative AI is artificial intelligence that can generate entirely new content and has become wildly popular in 2023 following the launch of <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-chat-gpt-2023-1">OpenAI's ChatGPT</a>. While that tool can generate paragraphs of text that look like it was written by a human, others tools like Stable Diffusion exist for generating images. They are able to accomplish this by studying hundreds of millions if not billions of image samples from which they learn how to essentially mimic humans. After Stable Diffusion has seen enough images of a dog, for instance, the AI learns how to create an entirely new picture of a dog. But that ability to mimic humans means that generative AI comes with all the baggage that humans do, like pre-existing biases. A computer program is influenced by human decisions — and the data they train it on. Because these AI programs learn from existing images from around the web, they reflect what the broader public thinks of as the typical "African worker." <div type="image" title="fds" height="1592" width="1570" msid="99757840" hostid="261" sizebytes="211678"></div>Stability AI and OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment. Stability AI is the developer of Stable Diffusion.Critics have warned that the tech industry is moving into generative AI with the same <a href="https://publicknowledge.org/ai-doesnt-need-to-move-fast-and-break-things/">move-fast-and-break-things mentality</a> it did at the launch of social media platforms; get the technology out there first, and deal with the consequences later. Proponents for their part argue that the technology <a href="https://observer.com/2023/03/google-released-its-bard-ai-before-it-was-ready-but-that-might-be-better-than-waiting/">needs to be tested out in the open</a> in order to improve and that the benefits of AI to do things like improve productivity ultimately outweigh the negatives.Last year, the AI avatar app Lensa faced scrutiny for generating images of women that were <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/12/1064751/the-viral-ai-avatar-app-lensa-undressed-me-without-my-consent/?truid=&amp;utm_source=the_algorithm&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=the_algorithm.unpaid.engagement&amp;utm_content=04-19-2023&amp;mc_cid=5b274fd045&amp;mc_eid=7b0c2b2fc7">heavily sexualized</a> — meanwhile, avatars created of men depicted them as astronauts and other PG-friendly characters. Stable Diffusion is trained on LAION-5B, a <a href="https://laion.ai/blog/laion-5b/">large open-source dataset of images</a> scraped from the web. Because the images that Stable Diffusion is trained on are available for anyone to view, it's possible to trace back why the image generation tool thinks that "African workers" look a certain way. But even a simple Google search for similar terms returns similar images. <div type="image" title="Screenshot of images generated by Bing's AI-powered image creator meant to depict African workers. Images show them working outside in what appears to be sub-Saharan Africa." height="1202" width="1926" msid="99757842" hostid="261" sizebytes="97332"></div>An academic who spoke with Insider, who requested anonymity because they did not have permission from their employer to speak to the media, said that model developers should collect better training data that wouldn't perpetuate problematic stereotypes. But manual data collection at the scale required to train a model would be prohibitively expensive. Scraping large amounts of data from the open web and existing training sets is much more efficient. Sasha Luccioni, a researcher at Hugging Face with a PhD in artificial intelligence, told Insider that AI tools will output a lot of bias depending on how they are used. "If we are talking about AI-assisted tools for artists, which involves a lot of human-in-the-loop interaction between the artist and model, then the harms can be controlled and contained." Models that generate stock imagery based on a prompt, on the other hand, should include safety mechanisms or disclaimers to inform users that they may reproduce stereotypes. Luccioni mentioned how Disney recently added disclaimers to older films on its Disney+ streaming service which say the films, like Aladdin, may feature cultural stereotypes that do not reflect the company's views. She thinks that text-to-image models like DALL-E or Stable Diffusion should feature something similar. Some model developers work to <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/google-bard-chatbot-googlers-sundar-pichai-2023-2">"steer" their products away from</a> producing certain outputs, such as by ensuring text models don't refer to a doctor with "he/him" pronouns but rather more gender-neutral terms. More training could help prevent image models from producing harmful output.Stability AI uses a system called CLIP (Contrastive Language Image Pretraining) to help it generate images. CLIP learns how to match images in a data set to descriptive text. It's been found that <a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3531146.3533183">CLIP includes gender and racial bias</a>, with women being associated with sexual content while, for instance, men are associated with career-related content. <div type="image" title="Screenshot of Bing's AI-powered &quot;Image Creator&quot; rendering images of European workers. The workers stand side-by-side, smiling and wearing professional outfits." height="1340" width="1896" msid="99757845" hostid="261" sizebytes="73170"></div>Bias has long been an issue in the field of artificial intelligence. For instance, there are numerous cases of Black people being <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/06/24/882683463/the-computer-got-it-wrong-how-facial-recognition-led-to-a-false-arrest-in-michig">erroneously taken into custody</a> after law enforcement used facial recognition technology to identify suspects. Facial recognition tools have been found to <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/facial-recognition-tool-led-mistaken-arrest-lawyer-says-rcna64270">misidentify people of color at disproportionately higher rates</a> compared to white people.A ProPublica report from 2016 found that judges in some courts across the United States were <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing">making bail decisions</a> based on an algorithm's estimation that a criminal would re-offend, a calculation weighted in part on crime rates in a person's zip code. Luccioni said that when it comes to high-risk settings such as justice or health, "there should clearly be a hard line beyond which AI models cannot be used" because they could have a direct impact on people's lives.Stable Diffusion and DALL-E — as well as chatbot tools like ChatGPT, Google's Bard, and Character.ai — are also facing scrutiny over copyright concerns. Stability AI, the company that develops Stable Diffusion, was <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/6/23587393/ai-art-copyright-lawsuit-getty-images-stable-diffusion">sued in February</a> by Getty Images, which alleges that company used millions of its images to train its AI models.

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Billionaire Marc Andreessen says he's teaching his 8-year-old son ChatGPT: 'This is like the most important thing I've done as a father'

Grace Kay

We wanted to ask Elon Musk about Twitter, Trump, and Tesla. But he seemed kinda busy, so we went with the next best thing: an AI version of him.

Marshall Gunnell

Two Google engineers built a ChatGPT-like AI chatbot years ago, but execs reportedly shut it down due to safety concerns

Aaron Mok

People are grieving the 'death' of their AI lovers after a chatbot app abruptly shut down

Rob Price

Stable Diffusion and DALL-E display bias when prompted for artwork of 'African workers' versus 'European workers'

Thomas Maxwell

When your AI girlfriend says she loves you

Rob Price