How AI chatbots manipulate you and undermine your privacy
At the risk of being among the first victims of artificial intelligence in a potential machine uprising, I keep my interactions with today’s generative AIs (or AI chatbots) strictly transactional.
I open the site, ask or request what I need, get the answer, close the site. No names, no pleases, no thank-yous, no small talk. I avoid anthropomorphizing them as much as possible. I treat them for what they are: statistical machines churning out words that make sense, not a new form of sentient life — at least, not yet.
Keeping a transactional relationship with AI chatbots is, for me, a way of keeping the line between us clearly drawn, to ward off an unlikely — but not impossible — “AI psychosis,” the kind of spiral where someone genuinely believes the AI is alive.
A newly published report by the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), authored by researchers Ruchika Joshi, Adinawa Adjagbodjou and Michal Luria, gave me further reasons to stand by that approach.