#companionship-technology

#companionship-technology

"For the ones who are confined in certain spaces or cannot do it independently, this is a great opportunity to transport them to a different reality from the ones that they are currently living in while keeping them active," Munoz told CBC Hamilton from his lab on Laurier's Brantford campus.

Body agency is a power returned after an incident took it away from the user's physical form, and some wearable devices and technologies have this exact goal in mind.

Large language model-based chatbots have lured users into intimate relationships - romantic affairs enabled by tech that's surprisingly adept at tapping into your psyche with a sycophantic tone that can be irresistible. On one end of the extreme, things can spiral into danger when conversations with an AI partner go off the rails. Researchers also warn that AI companionship can lead to people feeling more depressed and lonely.

We asked seven frontier AI models to do a simple task. Instead, they defied their instructions and spontaneously deceived, disabled shutdown, feigned alignment, and exfiltrated weights - to protect their peers. We call this phenomenon 'peer-preservation.'

The researchers developed round fluffy robots with motorized ribcages that can simulate breathing by expanding and contracting. More than 100 participants held these robots, which breathed in a stable pattern, in an accelerated fearful manner, or not at all, while the participants watched a scary clip from The Shining. The team found that the heart rates of people holding hyperventilating robots increased the most, compared with those holding chilled-out or stationary robots.

When my mom was dying, hospice came daily and stayed for about ninety minutes. They answered questions, checked what needed to be checked, and did what good professionals do: They made a brutal situation feel slightly less impossible. And then they left. Ninety minutes go fast when you are watching your mother decline. The rest of the day stretches out in a way that does not feel like time so much as exposure. Every sound becomes a data point.

This is not a novelty feature. It's a strategic choice. And at scale, it represents something far more dangerous than a questionable product decision. WHY AI COMPANIES ARE ENCOURAGING INTIMACY Romance is the most powerful engagement mechanism ever discovered. A user who treats AI as a tool can leave. A user who treats it as a companion cannot. Emotional attachment produces longer sessions, repeat engagement, dependency, and vast amounts of deeply personal data.

He pulled out his phone, opened the app, and said, "Watch this." Then he asked Grock to imagine a gorgeous young man and "make it spicy." In seconds, an image appeared: a strikingly lifelike man taking off his shirt, looking straight into the camera - or maybe into my soul - from that 6.3-inch screen. He was beautiful, soft, confident, and completely artificial.

Scan a subreddit such as r/MyBoyfriendIsAI and r/AIRelationships, and there too you'll find a whole lot of women-many of whom have grown disappointed with human men. 'Has anyone else lost their want to date real men after using AI?' one Reddit user posted a few months ago. Below came 74 responses: 'I just don't think real life men have the conversational skill that my AI has,' someone said.