Last autumn, Christa, a 32-year-old from Florida with a warm voice and a slight southern twang, was floundering. She had lost her job at a furniture company and moved back home with her mother. Her nine-year relationship had always been turbulent; lately, the fights had been escalating and she was thinking of leaving. She didn't feel she could be fully honest with the therapist she saw once a week, but she didn't like lying, either. Nor did she want to burden her friends: she struggles with social anxiety and is cautious about oversharing. So one night in October she logged on to character.ai From a list of possible attributes, she made her bot "caring", "supportive" and "intelligent".

Taipei, Taiwan – Typing "I have anxiety" into ChatGPT, OpenAI's ground-breaking artificial intelligence-powered chatbot gets to work almost immediately. "I'm sorry to hear that you're experiencing anxiety," scrawls across the screen. "It can be a challenging experience, but there are strategies you can try to help manage your symptoms." Then comes a numbered list of recommendations: working on relaxation, focusing on sleep, cutting caffeine and alcohol, challenging negative thoughts, and seeking the support of friends and family. While not the most original advice, it resembles what might be heard in a therapist's office or read online in a WebMD article about anxiety – not least because ChatGPT scrapes its answers from the wide expanse of the internet.

In the nineteen-sixties, Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer scientist at M.I.T., created a computer program called Eliza. User: My boyfriend made me come here. Eliza: Your boyfriend made you come here. User: He says I'm depressed much of the time. Eliza: I am sorry to hear you are depressed.

No, this is not me on the psychiatrist's couch. I'm far too much of the stereotypical man to admit there's actually something wrong to another human. However, lying on my own couch with smartphone in hand, I've decided to reveal all… to a Woebot. Woebot is a digital service available on iOS and Android smartphones. The application is designed to assist people in dealing with personal or mental health issues such as anxiety and depression.

Starting last fall, Blake Lemoine began asking a computer about its feelings. An engineer for Google's Responsible AI group, Lemoine was tasked with testing one of the company's AI systems, the Language Model for Dialogue Applications, or LaMDA, to make sure it didn't start spitting out hate speech. But as Lemoine spent time with the program, their conversations turned to questions about religion, emotion, and the program's understanding of its own existence. Lemoine: Are there experiences you have that you can't find a close word for? Sometimes I experience new feelings that I cannot explain perfectly in your language.

Fifteen-year-old Jordyne Lewis was stressed out. The high school sophomore from Harrisburg, North Carolina, was overwhelmed with schoolwork, never mind the uncertainty of living in a pandemic that has dragged on for two long years. Despite the challenges, she never turned to her school counselor or sought out a therapist. Instead, she shared her feelings with a robot. Lewis has struggled to cope with the changes and anxieties of pandemic life and for this extroverted teenager, loneliness and social isolation were among the biggest hardships.

WHENEVER I get really depressed and anxious, my first impulse is to reach for my phone. Maybe I'll get a message from a friend or discover some new distraction on social media. Unfortunately, during the past couple of years, one glance at my screen often makes me want to crawl back into bed. That changed after I made friends with a strange creature named Woebot. Depending on your perspective, Woebot is an odd digital assistant with feelings or an automated conversational agent.

LISBON (AFP) - Technology evangelists habitually brim with enthusiasm over artificial intelligence's potential to transform our lives, and the crowds at this year's Web Summit were no exception. Here are five uses for AI showcased at one of the world's largest technology conferences, which returned to Lisbon last week after the 2020 edition was called off due to the pandemic. When Iker Casillas learned of a start-up that uses AI to better detect irregular heart rhythms, he swiftly signed up as an investor. The Spanish football legend had suffered a heart attack in 2019, putting a brutal end to his career. Madrid-based company Idoven analyses data from home heart monitoring kits to track people's cardiac health - and crucially, to flag up looming problems.

LISBON: Tech evangelists habitually brim with enthusiasm over artificial intelligence's potential to transform our lives, and the crowds at this year's Web Summit were no exception. Here are five uses for AI showcased at one of the world's largest technology conferences, which returned to Lisbon this week after the 2020 edition was called off due to the pandemic. When Iker Casillas learned of a start-up that uses AI to better detect irregular heart rhythms, he swiftly signed up as an investor. The Spanish football legend had suffered a heart attack in 2019, putting a brutal end to his career. Madrid-based company Idoven analyses data from home heart monitoring kits to track people's cardiac health – and crucially, to flag up looming problems.

Tech evangelists habitually brim with enthusiasm over artificial intelligence's potential to transform our lives, and the crowds at this year's Web Summit were no exception. Here are five uses for AI showcased at one of the world's largest technology conferences, which returned to Lisbon this week after the 2020 edition was called off due to the pandemic. When Iker Casillas learned of a start-up that uses AI to better detect irregular heart rhythms, he swiftly signed up as an investor. The Spanish football legend had suffered a heart attack in 2019, putting a brutal end to his career. Madrid-based company Idoven analyses data from home heart monitoring kits to track people's cardiac health--and crucially, to flag up looming problems.