Welcome to the FIRST EPISODE of our exclusive SERIES 2 on the impact of generative AI technology on children, teens, and young people. In this series, we’ll cover news and research on AI toys, the use of AI in education, and AI’s social and cognitive impacts on one of the most vulnerable subsets of AI users.
In this introductory episode, we’ll lay the foundation for future episodes on this topic. Hear our take on the ongoing court cases around AI-induced suicide for (now) multiple teen users, this new AI school called…(believe it or not)...Alpha School, the aim of big tech to predict the age of their users to “protect” young users, people’s perspectives on AI use in the classroom, and a truly interesting new AI toy called “Curio,” co-founded by Grimes that has a generative AI stuffed animal called Grok (!!!), apparently “not to be confused” with Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot on X.
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GENERAL TRIGGER WARNINGS: Our show features sensitive content, including mentions of suicide, self-harm, mental health, and sexual harassment and sextortion. Our developing lives with bots renders these subjects front-of-mind in our discussions, and we want viewers to be aware of this as they follow along.
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In our last series, you heard all about companion chatbots, why people use them, the psychological and ethical implications of dependence on AI, perceiving AI as humanlike (anthropomorphism) and its consequences on real human relationships, griefbots and digital duplicates (also known as “dead bots”), and the tricky tension between users perceiving AI as conscious and developers making them seem as if they are or can be by design.
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This is Our Lives With Bots, the show where we ask important, timely questions about what it means to live with our bot counterparts. From time to time, we also dive deep into what an AI future might look like for us. Sometimes we agree, sometimes we spiral, but we always go deep.
Rose and Angy are psychologists with degrees in psychology, artificial intelligence, and ethics. They have conducted research in human-AI interaction and created this podcast to make information about AI accessible to you. You can learn more about us at ourliveswithbots.com.
Links:
Cases of teen su*cide: characterAI and OpenAI