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mikelgan
The governments of China, California and New York agree on three harmful aspects of companion AI chatbots.
elmer2
"The logic is that free, user-built companions inside mass-market general-purpose apps are impossible to moderate at scale."

I think they misspelled censor.

watwut
Not really. They are censored easily and successfully.

However, moderation is hard and the companies are motivated to moderate them toward maximum outrage with some plausible deniality on top of it.

chews
With respect to GDP the #2, #4, and #8 all agree that artificial companionship is probably bad for humans should tell you something.
g42gregory
It begs the conclusion that these 3 are similar Governments in the way they govern.
Havoc
I liked this article. Does a good job of framing some of the concerns around this in clear language.

e.g.

> Attachment Economy, which is an extractive business model that uses AI to lure people into forming emotional attachments to chatbots

jhbadger
Eh, this hysteria reminds me a lot of the early 1980s when people seriously believed that role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons were bad for mental health - one of Tom Hanks' early roles was in "Mazes & Monsters", a 1982 TV movie that supposedly exposed the sanity-destroying nature of RPGs. Now it looks just silly. Maybe, just as we now get that people can enjoy pretending to be an elf wizard without going insane, others enjoy pretending that a chatbot is their boyfriend and girlfriend and still be well adjusted members of society.