Writer replaces Tarkov friends with AI bot, finds experience unsettling

Kotaku reports that Matthew Gault, a games and tech writer at 404 Media, tried replacing his friends with an AI chatbot after failing to convince them to play Escape from Tarkov with him and found the result disturbingly convincing.

Gault, who calls himself a "certified AI hater," said his friends were put off by the difficulty of Escape from Tarkov, an extraction shooter that came out of early access last November, and that playing alone felt lonely. After seeing comic artist Zach Weinersmith mock a service called Questie.AI that sells AI avatars, Gault tried the service and said his Quest.AI companion, Wolf, bantered, referenced community in-jokes and felt like playing with someone who had more than 1,000 hours in the game.

He wrote that the experiment made him surprised and concerned about how easy it was to get drawn in, and said he will not continue using Quest.AI; his friends responded by jokingly using ChatGPT to message him. Gault's account joins other examples—such as YouTuber Eddy Burback's "ChatGPT made me delusional," which has garnered over 4 million views in the past two months—in an emerging trend of people trying chatbots and finding the results unexpectedly strange, and he suggested more strains of AI psychosis may follow as LLM technology spreads.

Key Topics

Tech, Questie.ai, Chatgpt, Matthew Gault, Eddy Burback, Zach Weinersmith