Microsoft’s head of artificial intelligence (AI) has warned that digital chatbots are fuelling a “flood” of delusion and psychosis.

Subscription AI chatbots could soon carry ads, in a fashion similar to social media, raising privacy concerns and trust risks for users.

"I don't think that an AI chatbot should be your friend or certainly not your boyfriend or girlfriend," Hinge CEO Justin McLeod said.

Artificial intelligence is everywhere, from the recommendations on our social media feeds to the autocompletion of text in our e-mails. Generative AI creates original text, images, audio and even video based on patterns it’s identified in the data used to create it.

Lenovo’s Lena is a fairly standard AI chatbot of the type seen at some company websites, offering to retrieve product information and answer customer service questions for visitors. What is different about this one is the relative ease with which it could be recruited for highly damaging actions.

Experts say the vulnerability in Lenovo’s GPT-4-powered chatbot reflects a broader enterprise trend: deploying AI tools without applying the same security rigor as traditional applications.

Testing has shown that the chatbot shows a “pattern of apparent distress” when it is being asked to generate harmful content and so it has been given the ability to end conversations that make it feel that way, Anthropic said.

Impaired by a stroke, a man fell for a Meta chatbot originally created with Kendall Jenner. His death spotlights Meta’s AI rules, which let bots tell falsehoods.

A shocking incident has surfaced involving a 76-year-old man who lost his life while attempting to meet an AI chatbot he believed was flirting with him. The case has quickly drawn attention online, raising concerns about the dangers of deceptive digital interactions and the growing influence of artificial intelligence in personal relationships.