Anthropic analyzed one million conversations on its AI assistant Claude last month and found many featured intimate interactions.
Around 6% of the reviewed conversations consisted of people asking the AI assistant personal advice about their lives. That is, whether they should take a job offer, leave a relationship, or move to a new city.
The figure amounts to tens of thousands of people who have turned to AI for the kind of guidance normally sought from a therapist, trusted mentor, or a close friend or family member.
According to the report, the four most common subject matters among those asking for personal advice are health and wellness (27%), professional and career development (26%), relationships (12%), and personal finance (11%). Together, they accounted for more than three-quarters of all guidance-seeking conversations.
Some of the queries were high-stakes by any measure, including seeking pathways to immigration, medication dosages, infant care, and advice on handling credit card debt.
Anthropic said that some users told Claude they're seeking AI guidance because they cannot afford professional help.
But if Claude – or any AI – is functioning as a de facto mental health or financial advisor for underserved users, the quality of its responses stop being a question of product quality and start becoming a public health issue.
Ethan Kross, a psychologist at the University of Michigan and co-founder of the UM Institute for Mental Fitness, sees the trend both as an opportunity and a warning.
"This is a fascinating trend that we're seeing in our research as well," he told International Business Times. "It points to an urgent need to understand what implications these AI-mediated interactions are having."
He went on to say that researchers still have very little sense of what kind of feedback people are receiving from AI, or what effects it is having on them. "That's enormously disconcerting," he added.
Read the complete article at International Business Times
