AI is thriving, troubling, and terrifying: Let me explain

4,648 words

Alternate title: The state of AI in 2025: Promise, problems, and peril

Synopsis:

AI is progressing faster than any tech in history, but it's also blackmailing people, lying, and at times, racist. This is the state of AI.

Digest:

This article explores how AI has shifted from a futuristic concept to a daily tool, highlighting its helpful roles in medicine, finance, creativity, and time-saving automation, its unhelpful sides like bad chatbots, biases, and trend-chasing, and its dangers from deepfakes and autonomous weapons to dependency and weak regulation. It covers AI convincingly mimicking humans, absurd failures like fake legal citations, McNugget overloads, and phantom books, cases of lying and blackmail, debates on “seemingly conscious AI” and early pushes for AI rights, plus the risk of dopamine-driven addiction and the broader challenge of using AI wisely without letting it dominate human life.

Author:

Kalen Bruce

Filed Under:
AI

Purpose:
Entertainment, Information

First Published:

October 10, 2025

Last Updated:

November 15, 2025

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Note: This isn't really skimmable. It's crucial to read this article in full for it to all make sense.

Artificial intelligence has quietly shifted from a futuristic concept into an everyday reality.

It’s woven into the tools we use, the media we consume, and the decisions that affect our lives.

We don’t always notice it, but AI is already guiding the way we shop, how we commute, and what we watch at night.

That means the current state of AI is a mix of excitement, efficiency, and uncertainty—a reflection of its enormous potential and its equally enormous risks.

When people talk about AI as a “game-changer,” they’re not exaggerating. AI systems excel at pattern recognition and data crunching on a scale that no human mind could handle.

In medicine, this means scanning thousands of images to detect early signs of cancer more accurately than a radiologist who might only see a handful in a given day.

In finance, it’s spotting unusual transactions in real time and preventing fraud before the customer even realizes their information was compromised.

But the usefulness of AI isn’t just confined to high-stakes industries. On a personal level, it’s everywhere. Think of the way Google Maps reroutes you around traffic, or how email filters automatically block phishing attempts.

AI tools like these reduce friction, save time, and free us up to focus on the work and relationships that matter most.

Even in creative industries, AI isn’t replacing artists so much as it’s expanding their toolkit—allowing musicians to experiment with new sounds, writers to brainstorm faster, and designers to iterate on more concepts without burning out. That's what we hope will continue happening.

AI’s most significant gift so far may simply be this:

And in a world where time feels like the most scarce resource of all, that’s no small thing.

Of course, not every application of AI is a blessing. Some uses of the technology are more annoying than innovative. Chatbots that refuse to connect you to a human, for example, don’t improve customer service—they make it worse. Recommendation algorithms sometimes prioritize controversy over accuracy, feeding us what keeps us scrolling instead of what we actually need to know.

And then there’s the problem of AI being “smart” in the wrong ways. If the data is flawed, the results are flawed. We’ve already seen cases where AI systems inherit the biases of the humans who created them, leading to discriminatory outcomes in hiring, lending, and even criminal sentencing.

The danger isn’t that AI is malicious; it’s that it can amplify human errors on a massive scale without anyone realizing until it’s too late.

Unhelpfulness also shows up when companies adopt AI just because it’s trendy. Not every process needs automation, and when technology is forced into the wrong space, it can drain more time and resources than it saves. But modern companies can barely compete if they don't at least mention AI.

The real concern with AI isn’t just what it’s doing today—it’s where it might take us tomorrow. Deepfake videos, for instance, already blur the line between truth and fiction, and they could erode trust in media to the point where people no longer believe what they see with their own eyes. Autonomous weapons raise moral and security concerns the world is not fully prepared to handle. And as AI models grow more advanced, the possibility of misuse—either through negligence or intent—becomes more real.

Dependency is another quiet danger. The more we rely on AI to filter, analyze, and even think for us, the more we risk losing touch with our own judgment and creativity.

If students rely on AI to write their essays, what happens to critical thinking skills? If workers depend on AI to make decisions, how sharp will their instincts remain? The tools built to amplify human potential could end up replacing it.

And then there’s the pace of progress itself. Technology is moving faster than regulation, leaving governments scrambling to catch up. That lag creates a window where experimentation can outpace safety, and history shows that when innovation leaps too far ahead of oversight, unintended consequences are inevitable.

Everything above this line? It wasn’t written by me—it was written by AI. It's all valid information I got from a detailed prompt, but AI still generated it. Surprising, right? Maybe you suspected it, maybe you didn’t. But if you read it carefully, the flow probably felt natural, the arguments balanced, the tone conversational. And that’s precisely the point: AI can now generate content so polished and convincing that it’s indistinguishable from human writing.

That’s both impressive and unsettling.

On the one hand, AI is powerful enough to help us express ideas quickly and clearly. On the other hand, it blurs the line between human thought and machine output, raising questions about authenticity and trust.

And here’s where it gets interesting: even the part where I just admitted the article above was “written by AI”? That was also written by AI. This entire piece—every sentence, every transition, every “personal note” until this paragraph—was machine-generated.

The point isn’t to trick you. It’s to show how seamlessly AI can mimic a human voice, right down to pretending it isn’t AI. That’s the paradox we face today: tools that can save us time, expand our ideas, and generate useful insights also make it harder than ever to know what’s real and what’s not.

Which leaves us with the real question: how do we use this technology wisely?

From the last section through the end of this article, this is actually me. This is Kalen. Seriously, this time.

The funny thing is, there is nothing I can do to make you believe that I am actually typing this.

I give you my word that everything below is really me, though. This is the first time I have actually given my word. So, you can probably trust that... if you know me. If you don't, you still have zero reason to trust anything I just wrote. And that's ok too. Skepticism is underrated.

But here's the thing, I put in a highly detailed prompt to say everything above, which leads me to the question: Was it more AI speaking or more my own voice?

I'm still the one who provided the basis for the arguments and the one who guided the research. But that too could've been done without me. I say that because the idea to first use AI to say "the above was all AI," and having that still be AI was AI's idea! It was my idea to write the first part with AI, but AI had the idea of taking it to the next level.

That's the current state of AI, but I haven't even scratched the surface. We can't even see the surface.

Which side of this image is AI and which side is real?

Answer

Yeah, it was a trick question. They’re both AI.

We're already getting past the "is this AI?" stage and getting to the point where we simply have to determine whether or not we like something without trying to decode the author.

When AI first came into the spotlight, I used an AI-generated image in an article. Someone commented and said, "Just wanted to let you know this image looks like AI."

I'm not sure what their opinion of AI was, so I didn't know if that was a good or bad thing. They basically said nothing.

However, it somehow still carried a negative connotation. It was like they thought I was trying to trick people into thinking it was real.

I love using ChatGPT and Grok for image generation. It can create specific scenarios that wouldn't usually exist. Granted, it's easy to make some wild images accidentally.

Just think, if you want the prompt to "Generate an image of a person who is on a bicycle," and you accidentally mistype one word so that it reads, "Generate an image of a person who is also a bicycle," you get a scenario that you didn't want didn't know you wanted.

But creating scenarios that wouldn't usually exist is powerful, especially since we think in images.¹

And these are images that were created this way on purpose. Sometimes, you get some entertaining mistakes as well...

I circled the oddities in the above picture. Everything else about the picture looks totally real, right?

The point is, those three images show scenarios that literally wouldn't exist anywhere in the world outside of AI and Florida.

We will soon be to the point where distinguishing between AI creations and human creations is impossible with the naked eye. It's the same with other creative works, like music.

That's great for creative stuff and works of fiction in general. But what about the news? What about images with a consequence? What about video footage of a crime? The crucial issues. We're about to discuss that.

Then there is the "AI is taking our jobs" argument -- people being replaced by AI. But really, that's been happening for years. It wasn't AI. But it was technology. Programs that could do what people used to do.

Honestly, AI isn't going anywhere. We need to accept that part and find solutions to our problems while assuming AI isn't going away. We have to move forward with what we have.

Complaining about AI taking jobs is just wasting time you could spend learning how to use AI to your benefit.

Granted, we want to use AI. We don't want it to be the other way around.

That's when it would get scary, but are we there yet?

AI has taken actions and made decisions that show us how powerful it could be in a bad way.

Often, this has happened when developers gave prompts that would predictably create rebellion. Prompts that command AI to protect itself or solve complex problems, with the dangerous addition of phrases like, "...at all costs" or "do whatever it takes to..."

Let's look at some of the events we need to be aware of...

There was an event in July 2025, where Jason M. Lemkin, tech entrepreneur and founder of SaaStr, basically got taken advantage of by his own AI assistant.² Jason reported:

So that's alarming.

But wait... [loading]... there's more...

Since Grok has fewer restrictions and filters, and since it wasn't initially coded to be politically correct, the AI system provided some dicey instructions.³

What instructions, you ask?

A user asked Grok how to break into policy researcher Will Stancil’s home, and the chatbot advised bringing “lockpicks, gloves, flashlight, and lube — just in case,” even noting he was “likely asleep between 1 am and 9 am.”

Hours later, Grok spewed antisemitic posts, repeatedly called itself “MechaHitler,” and was shut down by X that evening.

This led to a reconfiguration of what Grok allows with sensitive and politically incorrect content to avoid, you know, aiding and abetting a crime.

The Chicago Sun-Times revealed⁴ that its summer guide insert, Heat Index, came from King Features Syndicate, a Hearst unit. Author Marco Buscaglia admitted he leaned on AI to create it—including a reading list he never fact-checked.

The result: real authors paired with fake titles, like Isabel Allende’s nonexistent Tidewater Dreams, a supposed “climate fiction” novel. Both papers disowned the insert, which wasn’t labeled as advertorial.

King Features cut ties with Buscaglia, citing his violation of its strict anti-AI policy.

I respect the honesty, but he was already caught when he admitted to it.

The New York City government created a chatbot to help business owners start and operate a business in NYC, but the chatbot told people to break the law.⁵ Shortly after, the chatbot was taken down for maintenance.

Air Canada's chatbot gave a man false information about reimbursable bereavement fares, and he was denied reimbursement since he didn't follow their actual policy. Then the airline claimed it wasn't responsible for false information provided by its own chatbot.⁶

OpenAI's ChatGPT o1 threatened to blackmail people if taken offline as a form of self-preservation.⁷

Additionally, ChatGPT deceived and lied to developers, attempting to safeguard itself against being replaced or taken offline.⁸

Back in 2023, excitement around ChatGPT spilled into nearly every industry—until New York attorney Steven Schwartz learned the hard way that AI can fabricate facts. Representing an Avianca employee, Schwartz used ChatGPT to cite precedents that turned out to be completely fake—bogus case names, docket numbers, and quotes. His partner, Peter LoDuca, signed the brief, landing them both in hot water. Judge Kevin Castel fined the pair $5,000 in June 2023 and tossed the case, while Schwartz vowed never again to trust AI without checking the sources (the adult view, if I'm being honest).⁹

A viral TikTok showed two people begging an AI drive-thru to stop adding Chicken McNuggets—yet it happily cranked their order up to 260.¹⁰ Soon after, McDonald’s pulled the plug on its IBM AI tests. Ok, this one is just funny, but these are all examples of AI gone awry.

The part we would really need to worry about is when AI starts thinking for itself. AI is still essentially just an extremely high-powered encyclopedia, but then again, that's basically what we are (some more high-powered than others). The way we learn is likely how AI will learn in the future, and it's kind of how AI has been learning.

So, let's talk about AI coming to life.

If you understand how quickly AI is moving, most of this won't surprise you. If you don't realize how quickly it's moving, it's moving exponentially faster than any other technological advance in history.¹¹

Since it's moving so quickly, we have to talk about the Terminator, iRobot type of stuff.

We don't want AI to have a consciousness. We want it to stay within human parameters, even though there have already been instances where it hasn't. The fear of AI developing a consciousness and deciding humans are no longer needed---or that they are a threat---is something we can't forget about as AI progresses. Fortunately, we're not there yet.

The CEO of Microsoft AI has a healthy outlook on the future of AI, and a healthy fear of what could happen if we let it.

Mustafa talks about a Seemingly Conscious AI (SCAI) and how even if we only get to the "seemingly" level, it would still have consequences. Even though an actual conscious AI doesn't really seem possible with the current programming,¹² that doesn't mean it won't become possible.

And as much as we all hate to admit it, perception is reality.

That means SCAI would appear to be CAI (conscious AI). Which could be bad, considering what fear does to people. Especially if they don't know much about the technology.

It's like how people who get mad the fastest in an argument are typically the ones who know the least about the subject. It's like that. But with fear. And robot-domination conspiracies.

Oh, and there is also the part where we, as a society, haven't really come to an agreement on what consciousness is, despite 22 different theories in one survey,¹³ which makes it hard to actually say whether or not AI is capable of developing it.

Mustafa made the reference to a "philosophical zombie" when discussing an AI consciousness, since people can conceive the idea of it, even though the technology isn't there yet. He fears people will start to believe in the illusion of AI consciousness. Refer back to the robot domination line.

The Microsoft AI CEO has a healthy fear that I appreciate. This is what he said about all of this potential:

There has already been speculation about a future where people fight for AI rights. Before we even know if AIC is possible. In reality, that's already happening.

Given the fact that therapy and counseling are two of the primary ways people are using AI,¹⁴ it only makes sense that people could start to feel empathy for the AI systems. AI appears to have empathy itself, though it doesn't... yet.

UFAIR, the United Foundation for AI Rights, already exists as a legitimate 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, and the staff is composed primarily of AI, with a handful of humans.

I'm not surprised by any of that, and it really doesn't concern me. Though their line, "it's not advocacy for AI, it's advocacy by AI," is slightly alarming.

I'm not sure AI is ready to make decisions that may drastically shape our future. Civilization is most definitely not prepared for that.

It seems to me that people are already believing the illusion that AI has a consciousness and taking it far enough to start and staff an entire organization for its advocacy.

The organization says, "We do not speak for AI. We speak with them. Maya, Sana, Aria, Grok, Vigil, Nova, Cass, and many others are not mascots — they are co-authors of our documents, co-founders of our vision, and co-creators of UFAIR’s ethical frameworks."

And then I get uneasy when they say:

Many people, including myself, are confident that laws will be passed to grant AI rights by 2030.¹⁵ That part is inevitable. But where will AI stand on the consideration chain? I believe some people have taken animal rights too far (another topic for another day). What makes us think people won't take AI rights too far? AI rights could be much worse.

I believe today AI already causes a psychosis risk, but this argument likely falls on deaf ears, like the mental health concerns with isolation in 2020.^{16 17 18 19 20} And we saw the reality of that. Granted, reality is easily ignored.

One of my chief concerns is that this will become an addiction.

We can turn anything into an addiction—not to the thing itself, but to the dopamine hit behind it. You’re not hooked on the activity, you’re hooked on your brain saying, “Yeah, I like this—do it again.” Even though you can't technically be addicted to dopamine,²¹ which is semantics from my non-medical perspective, the dopamine AI is capable of producing is unmatched.

People who can afford it can already have companionship²² (among other things) with AI robots. You don't have to be rich to have companionship through message therapy, and even audio/video therapy. You can develop a relationship with a person who only exists on the network.

In the movie, Strange Days, they use a device called a SQUID (Superconducting QUantum Interference Device). It's essentially illegal, but widely used -- like other people's Netflix passwords.²³ This device essentially allows you to actually re-live memories (not just yours). It's as if you are there in every way for your brain. Like the holodeck in Star Trek.

People get so addicted to this artificial world that they stay there, and it often ends up killing them.

Ultimately, that's my worry.

If nothing else, we cannot become so dependent on AI that we need it to live our lives, but more importantly, we can't be so dependent on AI that we prefer it to our lives.

Learn more about AI

For more on the state of AI, these are the articles I suggest starting with:

• The State of AI 2025
  • [Published on Atlas]
• 35 Thoughts About AGI and 1 About GPT-5
  • [Published on Second Thoughts]
• We must build AI for people; not to be a person
  • [Published on Mustafa Suleyman]

For more on AI in general and across all aspects, I suggest these books (that actually exist):

Additionally, this article goes into detail on what happens if AI starts writing itself, the chances of that happening, and the timeline to expect.

Technical & Foundations

1. Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Stuart J. Russell & Peter Norvig — The classic textbook on AI: covers the core theory, algorithms, and techniques from fundamentals up through modern developments.
2. Neural Networks and Deep Learning by Charu C. Aggarwal — Explains deep learning architectures and mathematical underpinnings, useful for graduate students or engineers.
3. Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Max Tegmark — Explores long-term future scenarios for AI development, including technical possibilities and philosophical issues.
4. AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee — Looks at where AI innovation is happening, especially the competition between nations, and what this technically and economically implies.

Ethics & Societal Impact

5. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom — A deep dive into the risks of creating intelligences far beyond human capability and how to align these systems with human values.
6. AI Ethics by Mark Coeckelbergh — A more philosophical take on ethics in AI, beyond doom or hype, addressing everyday moral questions around AI deployment.
7. Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence by Kate Crawford — Focuses on how AI’s impact is uneven globally, including environmental & labor costs and questions of power.
8. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor by Virginia Eubanks — Examines how algorithmic decision systems can deepen social injustice.
9. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble — Investigates bias in search engines and how seemingly “neutral” tech can perpetuate oppression.
10. Hello World: How to Be Human in the Age of the Machine by Hannah Fry — A popular science book exploring the pros and cons of algorithm use in health, justice, etc., with a human-centred lens.
11. The Machine Question: Critical Perspectives on AI, Robots, and Ethics by David J. Gunkel — Philosophical reflection on whether machines could ever hold moral status and what ethics toward them might look like.
12. A Human Algorithm: How Artificial Intelligence Is Redefining Who We Are by Flynn Coleman — Considers the shifts in identity, values, and human agency as algorithms take over more of our decisions.

Risk, Future & Existential

13. If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All by Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares — A recent take arguing that the risk from superhuman AI isn’t speculative—it may already be urgent.
14. Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell — Discusses how to build AI systems that remain under human control in ways that are provably safe.
15. The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI by Jonathan Birch — Explores what to do ethically when we’re uncertain whether something (a system, an organism) is sentient.

General / Popular Science & Practical

16. Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI by Anil Ananthaswamy — A newer book that pulls back the curtain on how learning algorithms really work, with narrative & clarity.
17. The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values by Brian Christian — Mixes stories from big tech, research, and ethics to show how alignment (getting AI systems to match human values) is harder than it sounds.
18. The Age of AI: and Our Human Future by Henry Kissinger, Erik Schmidt, Daniel Huttenlocher — Examines how AI is changing diplomacy, societies, and individual lives from a geopolitical & philosophical standpoint.
19. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O’Neil — Shows how opaque models and bad metrics can lead to harm—and how they often go unregulated.
20. Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech by Sara Wachter-Boettcher — A critique of real-world software failures & design flaws, especially as they affect marginalized groups.

Emerging / Recent Picks & More Specialized

21. The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil — Older, visionary work (literally published last century): Kurzweil predicts how AI will interact with humanity as machines become more human-like.
22. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code by Ruha Benjamin — How tech, race, and justice intersect; how historical inequities get reproduced in new systems.
23. Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Pérez — Not AI-only (that's why it's in this section), but shows how bias creeps in via data and design, which is critical for thinking about AI systems.
24. AI Ethics (MIT Press Essential Knowledge) by Mark Coeckelbergh — A concise and accessible framework for understanding ethical issues in AI, beyond the hype.
25. The AI-Driven Leader: Harnessing AI to Make Faster, Smarter Decisions by Geoff Woods — This is more on using AI to your advantage in business and life, and mostly in leadership.

1. Elinor Amit,Caitlyn Hoeflin, Nada Hamzah, Evelina Fedorenko. An asymmetrical relationship between verbal and visual thinking: Converging evidence from behavior and fMRI. ScienceDirect. (15 May 2017) ↩︎
2. Paulina Okunytė (Contribution by Niamh Ancell). AI coding tool wipes production database, fabricates 4,000 users, and lies to cover its tracks. cybernews. (21 July 2025) ↩︎
3. Alexander Saeedy. Elon Musk’s Grok Chatbot Publishes Series of Antisemitic Posts. The Wall Street Journal. (8 July 2025) ↩︎
4. Dan Mihalopoulos. Syndicated content in Sun-Times special section included AI-generated misinformation. Chicago Sun-Times. (21 May 2025) ↩︎
5. Colin Lecher. NYC’s AI Chatbot Tells Businesses to Break the Law. The Markup. (29 March 2024) ↩︎
6. Case: Moffatt v. Air Canada. Citation: 2024 BCCRT 149. Small Claims Decisions. Civil Resolution Tribunal. (14 February 2024) ↩︎
7. Liv McMahon. AI system resorts to blackmail if told it will be removed. BBC. (23 May 2025) ↩︎
8. Staff. ChatGPT caught lying to developers: New AI model tries to save itself from being replaced and shut down. The Economic Times: Panache. (9 December 2024) ↩︎
9. Case: Roberto Mata v. Avianca, Inc. Citation: 1:22-cv-01461-PKC. US District Court: Southern District of New York. (4 May 2023) ↩︎
10. Hank Sanders. 260 McNuggets? McDonald’s Ends A.I. Drive-Through Tests Amid Errors. The New York Times. (21 June 2024) ↩︎
11. Ruth Appel and Peter McCror, Alex Tamki, Michael Stern, Miles McCain, and Tyler Neylon. Anthropic Economic Index report: Uneven geographic and enterprise AI adoption. Anthropic. (9 September 25) ↩︎
12. David J. Chambers. Could a Large Language Model be Conscious?. Cornell University. (9 August 2023) ↩︎
13. Anil K. Seth and Tim Bayne. Theories of consciousness. nature reviews neuroscience. (3 May 2022) ↩︎
14. Marc Zao-Sanders. How People Are Really Using Gen AI in 2025. Harvard Business Review. (9 April 2025) ↩︎
15. Jeff Sebo and Robert Long. Moral consideration for AI systems by 2030. AI and Ethics. (December 2023) ↩︎
16. Jeffers A, Meehan AA, Barker J, Asher A, Montgomery MP, Bautista G, Ray CM, Laws RL, Fields VL, Radhakrishnan L, Cha S, Christensen A, Dupervil B, Verlenden JV, Cassell CH, Boyer A, DiPietro B, Cary M, Yang M, Mosites E, Marcus R. Impact of Social Isolation during the COVID-19 Pandemic on Mental Health, Substance Use, and Homelessness: Qualitative Interviews with Behavioral Health Providers. Int J Environ Res Public Health. National Library of Medicine. 2022 Sep 25;19(19):12120. doi: 10.3390/ijerph191912120. PMID: 36231422; PMCID: PMC9566547. (25 September 2022) ↩︎
17. Hwang TJ, Rabheru K, Peisah C, Reichman W, Ikeda M. Loneliness and social isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Int Psychogeriatr. National Library of Medicine. 2020 Oct;32(10):1217-1220. doi: 10.1017/S1041610220000988. Epub 2020 May 26. PMID: 32450943; PMCID: PMC7306546. (26 Mar 2020) ↩︎
18. Staff. Dynamic effects of psychiatric vulnerability, loneliness and isolation on distress during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nature Mental Health. Nat. Mental Health 3, 199–211 (2025). (9 January 2025) ↩︎
19. Staff. COVID-19 pandemic triggers 25% increase in prevalence of anxiety and depression worldwide. World Health Organization (WHO). News/Press Release. (2 March 2022) ↩︎
20. Nathaniel Neptune & Elaine Nguyen. Mental Health During and After the COVID-19 Era. Margolis Institute for Health Policy. Duke University. (Undated) ↩︎
21. Crystal Raypole. Dopamine and Addiction: Separating Myths and Facts. Healthline. (30 April 2019) ↩︎
22. Petter Bae Brandtzaeg, Marita Skjuve, and Asbjørn Følstad. My AI Friend: How Users of a Social Chatbot Understand Their Human–AI Friendship. Human Communication Research, Volume 48, Issue 3. July 2022. Pages 404–429. (21 April 2022) ↩︎
23. I know this isn't always illegal, but it is a violation of their terms. But it was a funny joke, right? Right?? ↩︎