Dear reader,
Last year, I got an email from someone asking for my help. He had stumbled on a groundbreaking scientific theory, and asked if I could help him share it.
The strange part was, he had come up with this theory in conversation with an AI chatbot, like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude.
I don’t know if his theory is credible or not, but I soon learned he wasn’t alone. Lots of people, all over the world, passionately believed the same thing: that chatbots had helped them make a fabulous scientific breakthrough, or find the cure to a disease – or that their AI had become conscious.
I set out to understand: what were AI chatbots doing to these people? And along the way I realised, that was the wrong question.
The one we need to ask is, what are AI chatbots doing – to us?
Over the past four years, more than a billion people have suddenly started talking to machines, using AI chatbots for advice, comfort, support and companionship. It might be the most significant social transformation of our lifetimes – and we are just starting to understand what it looks like.
Black Box: The Chatbots is a podcast series about this strange moment. The whole series is available right now by searching Black Box wherever you get your podcasts or listen on the Guardian app. |
