Once upon a time, when chatbots were still quaint little online novelties full of charmingly canned responses, my younger self aired out some of her teenaged anxieties to an eagerly listening screen. My typed words briefly painted a night sky before disappearing among its stars. The name of this encouraging chatbot—and hopefully my words along with it—have been lost to time, but the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Today, there's definitely still an audience that would rather seek reassurance from the black box of AI than another human being—which is concerning when you learn just which chatbots OpenAI recommends. Tech researcher and commentator, Molly White, recently wrote about the Looksmaxxing GPT, a recently spotlighted 'lifestyle chatbot' that is "pushing extreme surgeries" amid incel ideology. Though no longer among the lifestyle category's top six bots, this GPT was featured as recently as the end of May.
