Last 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”.
This trend will not slow down, and social upheaval is imminent.
As a red teamer at OpenAI, I conduct safety testing on their new AI systems before public release, and the testers are consistently wowed by the human-like behavior. Most people, even those in the field of AI who are racing to build these new data centers and train larger AI models, do not yet see the radical social consequences of digital minds. Humanity is beginning to coexist with a second apex species for the first time in 40,000 years – when our longest-lived cousins, the Neanderthals, went extinct.
Instead, the vast majority of AI researchers have tunnel vision on the technical capabilities of AI. Like the public, we obsess over the hottest new product that can create unbelievably realistic videos or answer PhD-level science questions. Social media discourse is fixated on benchmarks such as the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus.
Unfortunately, like standardized tests for human children, benchmarks measure what an AI can do in an isolated environment like memorizing facts or solving logical puzzles. Even studies on “AI safety” tend to focus on what AI systems do in isolation, not on human-AI interaction. We squander our brainpower on the vaporous goal of precisely measuring and increasing intelligence – not zooming out and understanding how that intelligence will be used.
Humanity has never spent enough time preparing for digital technology. Lawmakers and academics did little to prepare for the effects of the internet, particularly social media, on mental health and polarization.
The story grows more unsettling when we consider humanity’s track record in dealing with…
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