On the latest Last Week Tonight, John Oliver looked into AI chatbots, the new toys that “save significant time writing emails, and all it costs us is everything else on Earth”. These chatbots have flourished in recent years, from OpenAI’s ChatGPT to a products including bible.ai and EpiscoBot, some of which operate a “chat with Jesus” and other biblical figures including Satan, though he’s only available to premium users. “And that is tempting,” said Oliver. “There are a bunch of questions I’d love to ask him, including, ‘Hey, how are the Queen and Prince Philip doing down there?’”
Since it launched in 2023, ChatGPT alone has amassed more than 800 million weekly users – a 10th of the world’s population, and studies have found that as many as one in eight adolescents are turning to AI chatbots for mental health advice; many more have formed genuine attachments to AI “friends”.
