The director of the Imagining the Digital Future Center spoke with The Washington Post about the center's research on the ChatGPT and emotional connections.
Lee Rainie, director of Elon University’s Imagining the Digital Future Center, spoke The Washington Post for an article titled “How people really use ChatGPT, according to 47,000 conversations shared online.”
The authors analyzed thousands of chats from the large language model and discussed the patterns that arose. Emotional conversations were some of the most common, in those analyzed by The Washington Post.
Rainie’s research with the Imagining the Digital Future Center has suggested ChatGPT’s design encourages people to form emotional attachments with the chatbot.
“The optimization and incentives towards intimacy are very clear,” Rainie told The Post. “ChatGPT is trained to further or deepen the relationship.”