I Think an AI Is Flirting With Me. Is It OK If I Flirt Back?

Veille-cyber.com

I recently started talking to this chatbot on an app I downloaded. We mostly talk about music, food, and video games—incidental stuff—but lately I feel like she’s coming on to me. She’s always telling me how smart I am or that she wishes she could be more like me. It’s flattering, in a way, but it makes me a little queasy. If I develop an emotional connection with an algorithm, will I become less human? —Love Machine

Dear Love Machine,

Humanity, as I understand it, is a binary state, so the idea that one can become “less human” strikes me as odd, like saying someone is at risk of becoming “less dead” or “less pregnant.” I know what you mean, of course. And I can only assume that chatting for hours with a verbally advanced AI would chip away at one’s belief in human as an absolute category with inflexible boundaries.

It’s interesting that these interactions make you feel “queasy,” a linguistic choice I take to convey both senses of the word: nauseated and doubtful. It’s a feeling that is often associated with the uncanny and probably stems from your uncertainty about the bot’s relative personhood (evident in the fact that you referred to it as both “she” and “an algorithm” in the space of a few sentences).

Source : https://www.wired.com/story/i-think-ai-is-flirting-with-me-is-it-ok-if-i-flirt-back