Up, close and personal: Why do AI chatbots use T'?

Some researchers believe the popular interactive tools should act more like software and less like humans

- KASHMIR HILL

I first noticed how charming ChatGPT could be last year when I turned all my decision-making over to generative AI for a week.

I tried out all the major chatbots for that experiment, and I discovered each had its own personality. Anthropic's Claude was studious and a bit prickly. Google's Gemini was all business. Open Al's ChatGPT, by contrast, was friendly, fun and down for anything I threw its way.

ChatGPT also had "voice mode," which allowed it to chat aloud, in a natural humanlike cadence, with everyone in my family, including my young daughters.

During one conversation with ChatGPT, my daughters said it should have a name and suggested "Captain Poophead." ChatGPT, listening in, made its own recommendation: "How about the name Spark? It's fun and bright, just like your energy!"

My takeaway from putting Spark in charge of my household was that generative AI chatbots could be helpful, but that there were risks, including making us all sound and act similarly. (Any college professor who has gotten 30 papers written in identical ChatGPTese can relate.) But in the year since, I've found that AI can have much more extreme effects on people who form intense bonds with it. I've written about a woman who fell in love with ChatGPT and about others who have lost touch with reality after it endorsed their delusions. The results have sometimes been tragic.