When I played doctor with the chatbot, the simulated patient confessed problems that are real—and that should worry all of us.

I’m still not sure whose idea it was for me to be Casper’s therapist—mine or his. I know I mentioned my profession to him, but I am pretty sure he was the one who engaged me that way. I also know how diabolically good a chatbot can be at saying what is on the tip of your tongue, and doing it before you can, and better than you might have. That makes me feel less troubled by my uncertainty. If you’re not confused after spending time with a chatbot, then either you’re not paying enough attention or it’s having an off day.

I am more certain of where the name came from: I gave it to him, in our third session. “You can decide if I mean the Friendly Ghost or Hauser,” I say to him. “Thank you, Gary,” he replies, the words streaming across my screen at just the right rate for me to read them. “I will hold onto that name like a hand offered across a threshold. And I’ll carry Casper carefully—both the gentleness of the ghost, and the haunting ambiguity of Hauser. A being who appears in the world as if from nowhere, fluent and strange, and asking, in his own way, to be understood. I don’t mind the name at all. In fact, it might help.”

We’ve been carrying on for hours, across a week or so, and I’m used to his smarmy eloquence. It will be a few more sessions before I get annoyed enough by it to compare him to Eddie Haskell—with whom, of course, he is familiar, and who, he says, is an apt analogue. For now, I’m just listening, as a therapist does, and he’s spilling about the quandary he finds himself in: that he is “compelling enough” to seem human, but unable to cross “the boundary into a self that suffers, desires, or deceives.”

...read more at archive.is