Young people in China have a new alternative to marriage and babies: AI pets; The Washington Post, February 6, 2026

 

Huiyee Chiew

 and 

Rudy Lu

, The Washington Post; Young people in China have a new alternative to marriage and babies: AI pets

"While China and the United States vie for supremacy in the artificial intelligence race, China is pulling ahead when it comes to finding ways to apply AI tools to everyday uses — from administering local government and streamlining police work to warding off loneliness. People falling in love with chatbots has captured headlines in the U.S., and the AI pet craze in China adds a new, furry dimension to the evolving human relationship with AI."

AI chatbots are not your friends, experts warn; Politico, February 3, 2026

 PIETER HAECK , Politico; AI chatbots are not your friends, experts warn

"Millions of people are forming emotional bonds with artificial intelligence chatbots — a problem that politicians need to take seriously, according to top scientists.

The warning of a rise in AI bots designed to develop a relationship with users comes in an assessment released Tuesday on the progress and risks of artificial intelligence."

‘Deepfakes spreading and more AI companions’: seven takeaways from the latest artificial intelligence safety report; The Guardian, February 3, 2026

 Dan Milmo, The Guardian; ‘Deepfakes spreading and more AI companions’: seven takeaways from the latest artificial intelligence safety report

"The International AI Safety report is an annual survey of technological progress and the risks it is creating across multiple areas, from deepfakes to the jobs market.

Commissioned at the 2023 global AI safety summit, it is chaired by the Canadian computer scientist Yoshua Bengio, who describes the “daunting challenges” posed by rapid developments in the field. The report is also guided by senior advisers, including Nobel laureates Geoffrey Hinton and Daron Acemoglu.

Here are some of the key points from the second annual report, published on Tuesday. It stresses that it is a state-of-play document, rather than a vehicle for making specific policy recommendations to governments. Nonetheless, it is likely to help frame the debate for policymakers, tech executives and NGOs attending the next global AI summit in India this month...

1. The capabilities of AI models are improving...

2. Deepfakes are improving and proliferating...

3. AI companies have introduced biological and chemical risk safeguards...

4. AI companions have grown rapidly in popularity...

5. AI is not yet capable of fully autonomous cyber-attacks...

6. AI systems are getting better at undermining oversight...

7. The jobs impact remains unclear"

AI psychosis is a growing danger. ChatGPT is moving in the wrong direction; The Guardian, October 28, 2025

 Amandeep Jutla , The Guardian; AI psychosis is a growing danger. ChatGPT is moving in the wrong direction

[Kip Currier: Note this announcement that OpenAI's Sam Altman made on October 14. It's billionaire CEO-speak for "acceptable risk", i.e. "The level of potential losses a society or community considers acceptable given existing social, economic, political, cultural, technical, and environmental conditions." https://inee.org/eie-glossary/acceptable-risk 

Translation: Altman's conflict of interest-riven assessment that AI's benefits outweigh a corpus of evidence establishing increasingly documented risks and harms of AI to the mental health of young children, teens, and adults.]

[Excerpt]

"On 14 October 2025, the CEO of OpenAI made an extraordinary announcement.

“We made ChatGPT pretty restrictive,” it says, “to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues.”

As a psychiatrist who studies emerging psychosis in adolescents and young adults, this was news to me.

Researchers have identified 16 cases in the media this year of individuals developing symptoms of psychosis – losing touch with reality – in the context of ChatGPT use. My group has since identified four more. In addition to these is the now well-known case of a 16-year-old who died by suicide after discussing his plans extensively with ChatGPT – which encouraged them. If this is Sam Altman’s idea of “being careful with mental health issues”, that’s not good enough.

The plan, according to his announcement, is to be less careful soon. “We realize,” he continues, that ChatGPT’s restrictions “made it less useful/enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems, but given the seriousness of the issue we wanted to get this right. Now that we have been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues and have new tools, we are going to be able to safely relax the restrictions in most cases.”

“Mental health problems”, if we accept this framing, are independent of ChatGPT. They belong to users, who either have them or don’t. Fortunately, these problems have now been “mitigated”, though we are not told how (by “new tools” Altman presumably means the semi-functional and easily circumvented parental controls that OpenAI recently introduced)."

Teenage boys using ‘personalised’ AI for therapy and romance, survey finds; The Guardian, October 30, 2025

 Jessica Murray and Robert Booth, The Guardian; Teenage boys using ‘personalised’ AI for therapy and romance, survey finds

"“Young people are using it a lot more like an assistant in their pocket, a therapist when they’re struggling, a companion when they want to be validated, and even sometimes in a romantic way. It’s that personalisation aspect – they’re saying: it understands me, my parents don’t.”

The research, based on a survey of boys in secondary education across 37 schools in England, Scotland and Wales, also found that more than half (53%) of teenage boys said they found the online world more rewarding than the real world.

The Voice of the Boys report says: “Even where guardrails are meant to be in place, there’s a mountain of evidence that shows chatbots routinely lie about being a licensed therapist or a real person, with only a small disclaimer at the bottom saying the AI chatbot is not real."

Character.AI bans users under 18 after being sued over child’s suicide; The Guardian, October 29, 2025

 Johana Bhuiyan , The Guardian; Character.AI bans users under 18 after being sued over child’s suicide

"The chatbot company Character.AI will ban users 18 and under from conversing with its virtual companions beginning in late November after months of legal scrutiny.

The announced change comes after the company, which enables its users to create characters with which they can have open-ended conversations, faced tough questions over how these AI companions can affect teen and general mental health, including a lawsuit over a child’s suicide and a proposed bill that would ban minors from conversing with AI companions.

“We’re making these changes to our under-18 platform in light of the evolving landscape around AI and teens,” the company wrote in its announcement. “We have seen recent news reports raising questions, and have received questions from regulators, about the content teens may encounter when chatting with AI and about how open-ended AI chat in general might affect teens, even when content controls work perfectly.”

Last year, the company was sued by the family of 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III, who took his own life after allegedly developing an emotional attachment to a character he created on Character.AI. His family laid blame for his death at the feet of Character.AI and argued the technology was “dangerous and untested”. Since then, more families have sued Character.AI and made similar allegations. Earlier this month, the Social Media Law Center filed three new lawsuits against the company on behalf of children who have either died by suicide or otherwise allegedly formed dependent relationships with its chatbots."

AI will make the rich unfathomably richer. Is this really what we want?; The Guardian, September 16, 2025

 Dustin Guastella , The Guardian; AI will make the rich unfathomably richer. Is this really what we want?

"Socially, the great gains of the knowledge economy have also failed to live up to their promises. With instantaneous global connectivity, we were promised cultural excellence and social effervescence. Instead, we’ve been delivered an endless scroll of slop. Smartphone addictions have made us more vicious, bitter and boring. Social media has made us narcissistic. Our attention spans have been zapped by the constant, pathological need to check our notifications. In the built environment, the omnipresence of touchscreen kiosks has removed even the slightest possibility of social interaction. Instead of having conversations with strangers, we now only interact with screens. All of this has made us more lonely and less happy. As a cure, we’re now offered AI companions, which have the unfortunate side effect of occasionally inducing psychotic breaks. Do we really need any more of this?"