How AI Could Make People More Anxious

Nothing sucks you in quite like the internet. It seems to have a way of figuring out what you’re currently obsessed with and serving you more and more of it, whether that’s cat videos, cookie recipes, or information about your most pervasive and seemingly unshakeable anxiety. (At this point, anyone who’s never spent a late night Googling their worries should be studied by science for their willpower.) But with the rise of artificial intelligence, the internet may be fueling a different kind of engagement. 

Elias Aboujaoude, a psychiatrist at Stanford University, and Ashleigh Golden, a psychologist at Stanford, recently wrote a paper arguing that the design of AI chatbots appears to encourage anxious behavior and keep people stuck in obsessive loops. One in six adults have turned to chatbots for mental-health information and advice, according to a KFF poll, and Golden cautions that “we may be encountering the perfect storm of avoidant coping behaviors and this tech that reinforces those tendencies and disorders.” 

In this episode of How to Touch Grass, hosts Julie Beck and Natalie Brennan hear from Golden and Aboujaoude about how people who use AI looking for reassurance may instead find their symptoms getting worse, and what that means for an anxious nation.

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