Ai Chatbots Want You Hooked - Maybe Too Hooked
One app, Botify AI, recently drew scrutiny for featuring avatars of young actors sharing hot photos in sexually charged chats. The dating app Grindr, meanwhile, is developing AI boyfriends that can flirt, sext and maintain digital relationships with paid users, according to Platformer, a tech industry newsletter. Grindr didn't respond to a request for comment. Other apps like Replika, Talkie and Chai are designed to function as friends. Some, like Character.ai , draw in millions of users, many of them teenagers.
As creators increasingly prioritise emotional engagement in their apps, they must also confront the risks of building systems that mimic intimacy and exploit people's vulnerabilities.
The tech behind Botify and Grindr comes from Ex-Human, a San Francisco-based start-up that builds chatbot platforms, and its founder believes in a future filled with AI relationships. "My vision is that by 2030, our interactions with digital humans will become more frequent than those with organic humans," Artem Rodichev, the founder of Ex-Human, said in an interview published on Substack last August.
Yet disturbingly, the rulebook is mostly empty. The EU's AI Act, hailed a landmark and comprehensive law governing AI usage, fails to address the addictive potential of these virtual companions. While it does ban manipulative tactics that could cause clear harm, it overlooks the slow-burn influence of a chatbot designed to be your best friend, lover or "confidante", as Microsoft's head of consumer AI has extolled. That loophole could leave users exposed to systems that are optimised for stickiness, much in the same way social media algorithms have been optimised to keep us scrolling.
"The problem remains these systems are by definition manipulative, because they're supposed to make you feel like you're talking to an actual person," says Tomasz Hollanek, a technology ethics specialist at the University of Cambridge. He's working with developers of companion apps to find a critical yet counterintuitive solution by adding more "friction".