Emotional AI: More harm than good?

Generative AI mimics human-generated text, images, and video, and it's got huge implications for geopolitics, economics, and security. But that's not all - emotionally intelligent AI is on the rise.

And sometimes the results are ugly. Take the mental health nonprofit, KOKO, which used an AI chatbot to support counselors advising 4,000 people who were seeking counseling. The catch: The patients didn't know that a bot was generating the advice they were receiving. While users initially rated the bot-generated responses highly, the therapy lost its effectiveness once the patients were informed that they'd be talking to a fancy calculator.

The real question is: When does emotionally intelligent AI cross the line into emotionally manipulative territory?

This is not just a concern for virtual therapists -- politics could be impacted. And who knows, maybe even your favorite TV host will use generative AI to convince you to keep watching. Now there's an idea.