Third of UK citizens have used AI for emotional support, research reveals

Key Highlights

• “While many users report positive experiences, recent high-profile cases of harm underline the need for research into this area, including the conditions under which harm could occur, and the safeguards that could enable beneficial use.”Artificial intelligence research has a slop problem, academics say: ‘It’s a mess’Read moreAISI based its research on a representative survey of 2,028 UK participants.
• It found the most common type of AI used for emotional purposes was “general purpose assistants” such as ChatGPT, accounting for nearly six out of 10 uses, followed by voice assistants including Amazon Alexa. It also highlighted a Reddit forum dedicated to discussing AI companions on the CharacterAI platform.
• It showed that, whenever there were outages on the site, there were large numbers of posts showing symptoms of withdrawal such as anxiety, depression and restlessness. The report included AISI research suggesting chatbots can sway people’s political opinions, with the most persuasive AI models delivering “substantial” amounts of inaccurate information in the process. AISI examined more than 30 unnamed cutting-edge models, thought to include those developed by ChatGPT startup OpenAI, Google and Meta.
• It found AI models were doubling their performance in some areas every eight months. Leading models can now complete apprentice-level tasks 50% of the time on average, up from approximately 10% of the time last year.
• AISI also found that the most advanced systems can autonomously complete tasks that would take a human expert over an hour. AISI added that AI systems are now up to 90% better than PhD-level experts at providing troubleshooting advice for laboratory experiments.