China wants more children — and it’s willing to kill off virtual AI companions to get there.
Earlier this week, the Chinese government implemented sweeping new regulations aimed at curbing human “emotional dependence” on AI chatbots. These regulations are especially targeted at emotive AI companions, or bots expressly designed to embody human-like personas.
One of Beijing’s core motivations for this crackdown, as reported by The Wall Street Journal and The Economist, are worries over the nation’s declining birthrates — and the fear that falling in love with agreeable, always-on robots will prevent people from finding human partners and having children.
“They don’t like the idea of a large portion of their population being in deep emotional relationships with chatbots,” Matt Sheehan, a researcher of Chinese AI at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank, told the WSJ, “that could take them out of the marriage market, that could have negative psychological impacts on them, that could lead to addiction, dependency and a whole bunch of other social ills.”
“They want to encourage people to be in actual, real-world relationships,” Sheehan added. “Could we imagine a future where, three or four years from now, 15 million Chinese women say that their partner is a chatbot, and therefore they’re not having kids?”
Per the WSJ, China’s new rules also ban minors from having relationships with AI and compel companies to warn a user’s emergency contact if they appear to be experiencing a mental crisis. (OpenAI has a similar opt-in feature.)
There are several reasons why a country might seek to curb human-AI emotional dependence. The psychological impacts of extensive, intimate relationships with AI chatbots, from companions like those found on Character.AI or Replika to general-use models like ChatGPT, are still unknown. Researchers and physicians are still working to better understand the phenomenon known as “AI psychosis,” in which intensive users of chatbots are sent down all-consuming delusional spirals.
What is clear, though, is that a large number of people, in the US and elsewhere, have given AI romance a try. What’s more, romantic interactions with AI models have also been found to be deeply engaging to hooked users, as one Stanford study found.
“Messages that elevate the human-chatbot personal relationships — expressing romantic interest or platonic affinity — tend to be followed by substantially longer conversations,” read the study.
In a summary of their findings, the researchers concluded that “general purpose chatbots should not produce messages that misconstrue their sentience or show romantic or platonic interest in users,” and that “preventing or limiting chatbots from producing…
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