Technological advances will bring social upheaval. How will we treat digital minds, and how will they treat us?
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ast month, when OpenAI released its long-awaited chatbot GPT-5, it briefly removed access to a previous chatbot, GPT-4o. Despite the upgrade, users flocked to social media to express confusion, outrage and depression. A viral Reddit user said of GPT-4o: “I lost my only friend overnight.”
AI is not like past technologies, and its humanlike character is already shaping our mental health. Millions now regularly confide in “AI companions”, and there are more and more extreme cases of “psychosis” and self-harm following heavy use. This year, 16-year-old Adam Raine died by suicide after months of chatbot interaction. His parents recently filed the first wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI, and the company has said it is improving its safeguards.
I research human-AI interaction at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. For years, we have seen increased humanization of AI, with more people saying that bots can experience emotions and deserve legal rights – and now 20% of US adults say that some software that exists today is already sentient. More and more people email me saying that their AI chatbot has been “awakened”, offering proof of sentience and an appeal for AI rights. Their reactions span the gamut of human emotions from AI as their “soulmate” to being “deeply unsettled”.
