An expert has issued a warning on how the biggest threat posed by artificial intelligence is actually the ‘power to seduce’ its users.
This comes after Professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds spoke to the New York Post where he shared his concerns about the possibility of AI taking over the world.
He explained: “You don’t have to have a 12,000 IQ or a 1,200 IQ or even 120 IQ to fool most human beings. You can take advantage of innate human characteristics… to manipulate them emotionally with machines that aren’t especially brilliant.
“The machine doesn’t think you’re smart, or funny, or lovable. It doesn’t think at all. We laugh at guys who think the stripper really likes him, but at least a stripper is capable of liking them.”
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The expert believes that the biggest threat to humanity could be AI’s ability to fool humans into thinking they have an intimate connection with that chatbot.
This is already an issue popping up around the world, with people claiming to have an ‘AI boyfriend’ or ‘AI girlfriend’.
Reynolds continued: “Seductive AI doesn’t depend on outsmarting people, but on essentially being lovable, being cute, being friendly, being sexy, so as to gain people’s trust and acquire influence over them.”
And people forming attachments to their AI bots isn’t as strange as you might think.
This is because humans often become attached to non-human things as Reynolds explained: “People love their cars, people love their boats, dolls, people love all kinds of things, and that’s just a natural human tendency, but you need to be aware that that can be used against you.”
However, that doesn't mean harboring a crush on AI is healthy.
In 2024, a teenager from Florida took his own life after ‘forming a relationship’ with a chatbot.
According to a lawsuit filed by the family, 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III from Orlando, Florida, had spent the final months of his life talking to chatbots on the server Character.AI.
While the teen knew that the ‘people’ he was talking to weren’t real, he formed an attachment and his family have said that Sewell would ceaselessly text with the online chatbots.
His mother Megan L. Garcia argues that the tech has an addictive design.
She said: “I feel like it’s a big experiment, and my kid was just collateral damage.”
Garcia added: “You want to get up and scream and say, ‘I miss my child. I want my baby’.”