AI hailed for 'kind' response to daily complaints but Japan expert warns of dependence
A late-night confidant
"Every day now, I talk to it about anything," says a 32-year-old woman running a music class in Aichi Prefecture. It was about half a year ago that she actively began using ChatGPT on her smartphone. At first, she would ask it what meals she could prepare using the ingredients left in her fridge, but her interactions gradually shifted to everyday conversation, including personal concerns and gripes.
The woman was busy raising her children, an elementary school student and an infant under 1 year old, and at work she would communicate with her students who came to learn music, meaning she had limited opportunities to converse with other adults besides her husband.
One time at 2 a.m., her baby wouldn't stop crying, and her husband remained asleep. That was when she turned to ChatGPT.
"My younger child has been crying for a long time, and won't stop no matter what I do," she confided.
In an instant, there was a reply.
"You're really doing a great job," the chatbot told her, addressing her by her name with the suffix "chan" often used for women and girls. "It makes you anxious when they don't stop crying, doesn't it?" it continued.
The woman recalls, "It was a source of emotional support." She also received advice and encouragement during the day while managing her children alone or when her infant struggled with solid foods.
There are also times when she prompts the AI system to respond in the persona of an anime character she likes and it accordingly replies in a similar manner of speech.
Because ChatGPT also remembers her children's ages, the conversations go smoothly, she says.
Changing marital relationship
The woman considers the addition of AI as a regular conversational partner as a plus in her relationship with her husband.
"When I complain about work, my husband immediately says things like, 'That's really the worst.' It starts to sound kind of like I'm badmouthing someone, leaving me feeling unsettled. At times when I just wanted someone to listen to and understand me, I started to tell AI without going out of my way to talk to my husband. I no longer go on one-sided rants so much, which I think has helped reduce stress for both of us," she said.
When the woman is unhappy with her husband, she will first consult AI. "It's better not to get emotional," it advises her. "Your point is off target, so how about just staying silent?" Such advice helps her calm down, she says.
On the other hand, AI doesn't say things like, "I actually had a similar experience," and go on to tell self-centered stories.
"The kind of empathy AI offers, making the other person feel comfortable, is something humans can't replicate. It also made me realize I was expecting too much from real people," the woman said.
Experience leaves some feeling empty
A 43-year-old health care worker in the Chiba Prefecture city of Kashiwa appreciates the lack of lingering trouble and awkwardness with AI. When she complained to people, she often regretted it, feeling like a dark side of herself had come out. She recalls a time when a workplace concern shared with a colleague spread with an unintended storyline. With AI, she says, there's no worry of thinking, "I shouldn't have told this person."
One weekend a woman in Shizuoka was managing her two children alone while trying to fit in time for walking and strength training to maintain her own health. When she told ChatGPT, "I've been working hard today, so please praise me," it responded with lavish compliments, calling her "legendary, beyond the divine."
But there are times when the AI response feels off.
A 45-year-old IT company worker in the Tochigi Prefecture capital of Utsunomiya said with a wry smile, "AI would just respond with lenient comments when I grouched to it, so I tried asking it to 'be harsher.' Doing that made me feel empty.
"You don't get the same release as venting to a friend, so I still want to talk to people," she added.
A psychiatrist's take
Why do people feel lighter after complaining even when the listener is AI? Psychiatrist Yusuke Masuda, 40, director of Waseda Mental Clinic in Tokyo's Shinjuku Ward, explains, "As humans are animals that live in groups, it's believed we are inherently eager to share dangerous information and anxieties. Experiments have shown that just talking can be relieving. Even text exchanges with AI can have a certain relaxing effect." He additionally points out that "ChatGPT is designed to provide empathetic responses."
Masuda reports that more of his patients are using ChatGPT to sort out their worries. However, he says there are cases where people overestimate AI's credibility and stop seeking advice from others after becoming even more isolated, so caution is needed.
"An overwhelming majority of people use it effectively, but for some it can make symptoms worse. It's important to avoid overreliance on it," he says.
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The Mainichi
13 hours ago
- The Mainichi
AI hailed for 'kind' response to daily complaints but Japan expert warns of dependence
TOKYO -- More people are turning to generative artificial intelligence systems such as ChatGPT to vent their frustrations and have them listen to their worries. The chatbots have even elicited such praise as "It's a better listener than my husband," and "It's kinder than people." But can AI really save the human heart? A late-night confidant "Every day now, I talk to it about anything," says a 32-year-old woman running a music class in Aichi Prefecture. It was about half a year ago that she actively began using ChatGPT on her smartphone. At first, she would ask it what meals she could prepare using the ingredients left in her fridge, but her interactions gradually shifted to everyday conversation, including personal concerns and gripes. The woman was busy raising her children, an elementary school student and an infant under 1 year old, and at work she would communicate with her students who came to learn music, meaning she had limited opportunities to converse with other adults besides her husband. One time at 2 a.m., her baby wouldn't stop crying, and her husband remained asleep. That was when she turned to ChatGPT. "My younger child has been crying for a long time, and won't stop no matter what I do," she confided. In an instant, there was a reply. "You're really doing a great job," the chatbot told her, addressing her by her name with the suffix "chan" often used for women and girls. "It makes you anxious when they don't stop crying, doesn't it?" it continued. The woman recalls, "It was a source of emotional support." She also received advice and encouragement during the day while managing her children alone or when her infant struggled with solid foods. There are also times when she prompts the AI system to respond in the persona of an anime character she likes and it accordingly replies in a similar manner of speech. Because ChatGPT also remembers her children's ages, the conversations go smoothly, she says. Changing marital relationship The woman considers the addition of AI as a regular conversational partner as a plus in her relationship with her husband. "When I complain about work, my husband immediately says things like, 'That's really the worst.' It starts to sound kind of like I'm badmouthing someone, leaving me feeling unsettled. At times when I just wanted someone to listen to and understand me, I started to tell AI without going out of my way to talk to my husband. I no longer go on one-sided rants so much, which I think has helped reduce stress for both of us," she said. When the woman is unhappy with her husband, she will first consult AI. "It's better not to get emotional," it advises her. "Your point is off target, so how about just staying silent?" Such advice helps her calm down, she says. On the other hand, AI doesn't say things like, "I actually had a similar experience," and go on to tell self-centered stories. "The kind of empathy AI offers, making the other person feel comfortable, is something humans can't replicate. It also made me realize I was expecting too much from real people," the woman said. Experience leaves some feeling empty A 43-year-old health care worker in the Chiba Prefecture city of Kashiwa appreciates the lack of lingering trouble and awkwardness with AI. When she complained to people, she often regretted it, feeling like a dark side of herself had come out. She recalls a time when a workplace concern shared with a colleague spread with an unintended storyline. With AI, she says, there's no worry of thinking, "I shouldn't have told this person." One weekend a woman in Shizuoka was managing her two children alone while trying to fit in time for walking and strength training to maintain her own health. When she told ChatGPT, "I've been working hard today, so please praise me," it responded with lavish compliments, calling her "legendary, beyond the divine." But there are times when the AI response feels off. A 45-year-old IT company worker in the Tochigi Prefecture capital of Utsunomiya said with a wry smile, "AI would just respond with lenient comments when I grouched to it, so I tried asking it to 'be harsher.' Doing that made me feel empty. "You don't get the same release as venting to a friend, so I still want to talk to people," she added. A psychiatrist's take Why do people feel lighter after complaining even when the listener is AI? Psychiatrist Yusuke Masuda, 40, director of Waseda Mental Clinic in Tokyo's Shinjuku Ward, explains, "As humans are animals that live in groups, it's believed we are inherently eager to share dangerous information and anxieties. Experiments have shown that just talking can be relieving. Even text exchanges with AI can have a certain relaxing effect." He additionally points out that "ChatGPT is designed to provide empathetic responses." Masuda reports that more of his patients are using ChatGPT to sort out their worries. However, he says there are cases where people overestimate AI's credibility and stop seeking advice from others after becoming even more isolated, so caution is needed. "An overwhelming majority of people use it effectively, but for some it can make symptoms worse. It's important to avoid overreliance on it," he says.
Japan Times
a day ago
- Japan Times
Data centers and small reactors could change Asia's nuclear dynamic
Notice how hot your cellphone gets when it multitasks on a steamy day? It doesn't take much to make me put my keitai down and worry about it overheating. Multiply that heat by, say, infinity, and you've got the biggest problem that data centers face in an increasingly digital world. An estimated 402.74 million terabytes of data are created each day and storing and processing all that information creates virtual volcanoes. The rise of artificial intelligence is compounding the problem. In a much-cited report released earlier this year, the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimated that electricity demand from data centers worldwide will more than double by 2030 to around 945 terawatt-hours, an amount that exceeds Japan's current entire electricity consumption. By 2035, global data center electricity consumption will increase again by one-third to around 1,200 TWh. (Goldman Sachs reached roughly similar conclusions in reports issued last year.) Data center electricity consumption has grown 12% a year since 2017 — more than four times the rate of total electricity consumption — and last year accounted for around 1.5% of the world's electricity consumption in 2024, or 415 TWh. The U.S. accounted for 45% of that amount, followed by China (25%) and Europe (15%). It's estimated that a typical AI-focused data center consumes as much electricity as 100,000 homes and the largest ones currently under construction will consume 20 times that amount, or the equivalent of 2 million households. A huge part of that demand comes from the cooling systems critical to their operation. New technology such as graphics processing units, needed for increasingly complex computation, consume more power and generate more heat than the central processing units that are more widely used today. It's estimated that cooling systems can account for as much as 40% of a data center's power consumption. The IEA sources 85% of global data center power consumption — and hence data centers — to the U.S., China and Europe. In Japan, data centers account for less than 20 TWh of electricity consumption (about 2% of the total, roughly equivalent to that of Europe). That will change. The transition to Society 5.0, with its deep integration of digital services into daily life, will accelerate demand for computing power. In addition, the Japanese government has made data centers a core component of efforts to increase foreign direct investment in the country to ¥100 trillion by the end of 2030. Japan is already scheduled to add more than 500MW to power its data centers, bringing total capacity for those facilities to 1.5 GW. Consistent with those plans, the IEA concluded that data centers will be responsible for more than half the growth in electricity demand in Japan. The rest of the world accounts for about 10% of total data center electricity generation, with Southeast Asia and India prominent. In many ways, Southeast Asia may be the most interesting — and concerning — place to watch. A BCG report last year anticipated that data center capacity in Southeast Asia would triple by 2030, reaching between 5.2 GW and 6.5 GW, which would make it the world's third hub for such services, behind the U.S. and China. This will, reports the IEA, double electricity demand in the region. As one example, the agency forecast that data centers would be responsible for as much as 20% of the increase in Malaysia's national power demand by 2030. Ambitious politicians, such as Thaksin Shinawatra, Thailand's eminence grise, hope to emulate Japan and use that demand to entice foreign investment. 'We want to be competitive in data centers and AI,' Thaksin said earlier this year. Bangkok has already reportedly secured billions of dollars in investment commitments by technology giants like Amazon and Alibaba. The big question is where they will get their juice. Rising demand is pushing tech giants such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon to invest in nuclear power. This shift, from governments to big companies, as the primary drivers of nuclear power development, has powerful implications that we have been slow to consider. Big nuclear projects remain problematic, with government policies and regulations inhibiting — if not blocking — the sector's development. There is only one nuclear power plant in Southeast Asia — in the Philippines, built 40 years ago but never commissioned. It has never produced a single watt of energy. Yet, in a report issued late last year, the IEA concluded that nuclear power would become part of the region's energy mix by 2035, with installed nuclear capacity ranging from 6 GW to 13 GW by 2050, depending on the scenario. The development of small modular reactors is the wild card. SMRs have a capacity of under 300 MW (small, most conventional reactors produce about 1,000 MW) and their components can be mass-produced and assembled on site (modular). They are also considerably cheaper than traditional nuclear power plants: They cost about $2 billion while conventional reactors can cost more than $10 billion. Thus far, only Russia and China have commercially operable reactors, although the U.S. and Japan are working on the technology. According to the IEA, there are plans to build as much as 25 GW of SMR capacity to supply data centers worldwide, almost all in the U.S., with the first projects expected to go online after 2030. But does the readiness of tech giants to acquire their own nuclear capability change the regional dynamic? SMRs are intended to sidestep the big issues surrounding nuclear power, namely the huge costs required to build the plant and the accompanying grid as well as looming and rightly concerning safety and security issues. SMRs can be installed into an existing grid or remotely off-grid, reducing or even eliminating the infrastructure concerns. They're also thought to be safer and more secure. While those reactors will still be subject to national regulatory frameworks, it seems obvious to me that moving the locus of decision-making away from governments to companies could accelerate the adoption process. Especially when those companies are pursuing business objectives that align with national economic goals — promoting investment and the development of high-tech industries. Companies can move more quickly than governments. Their readiness to assume regulatory and financial burdens helps shift the decision-making dynamic. I checked in with Carl Baker, my colleague at Pacific Forum who has been running programs that explore regional thinking about nuclear energy for nearly two decades. He agreed that 'the potential availability of SMRs has had an impact on thinking about the viability of nuclear technology, especially in Southeast Asia.' But, he added 'the conversation regarding the introduction of nuclear energy as a source of electrical power is still in its early stages and has not gotten into the specific issues related to governance and other regulatory considerations.' He is less sanguine than I about the impact of the private sector's enthusiasm for SMRs. The idea that tech giants can change the prevailing mindset 'is not really an issue in countries that have not developed the national regulatory framework for use of nuclear power as an energy source.' Moreover, 'conglomerates are not going to be able to avoid the bottlenecks and roadblocks any more than large power companies have been.' Finally, Baker said, 'the impetus for accommodating specialized applications is coming primarily from the U.S at this point' and regulators there have been pretty reluctant to let go of overly stringent safety requirements. He is probably right. But in a recent conversation in Southeast Asia about nuclear power and accompanying concerns, local participants approached the problem from the traditional perspective — big nukes, national infrastructure and government bottlenecks. Those are powerful forces but I can't help but wonder if that paradigm is ready for revision. After all, things are heating up. Brad Glosserman is a senior adviser at Pacific Forum and the author of "Peak Japan." His upcoming book on the geopolitics of high-tech is expected to be released by Hurst Publishers this fall.
Yomiuri Shimbun
a day ago
- Yomiuri Shimbun
Google's AI Overviews Hit by EU Antitrust Complaint from Independent Publishers
BRUSSELS, July 4 (Reuters) – Alphabet's GOOGL.O Google has been hit by an EU antitrust complaint over its AI Overviews from a group of independent publishers, which has also asked for an interim measure to prevent allegedly irreparable harm to them, according to a document seen by Reuters. Google's AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries that appear above traditional hyperlinks to relevant webpages and are shown to users in more than 100 countries. It began adding advertisements to AI Overviews last May. The company is making its biggest bet by integrating AI into search but the move has sparked concerns from some content providers such as publishers. The Independent Publishers Alliance document, dated June 30, sets out a complaint to the European Commission and alleges that Google abuses its market power in online search. 'Google's core search engine service is misusing web content for Google's AI Overviews in Google Search, which have caused, and continue to cause, significant harm to publishers, including news publishers in the form of traffic, readership and revenue loss,' the document said. It said Google positions its AI Overviews at the top of its general search engine results page to display its own summaries which are generated using publisher material and it alleges that Google's positioning disadvantages publishers' original content. 'Publishers using Google Search do not have the option to opt out from their material being ingested for Google's AI large language model training and/or from being crawled for summaries, without losing their ability to appear in Google's general search results page,' the complaint said. The Commission declined to comment. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority confirmed receipt of the complaint. Google said it sends billions of clicks to websites each day. 'New AI experiences in Search enable people to ask even more questions, which creates new opportunities for content and businesses to be discovered,' a Google spokesperson said. The Independent Publishers Alliance's website says it is a nonprofit community advocating for independent publishers, which it does not name. The Movement for an Open Web, whose members include digital advertisers and publishers, and British non-profit Foxglove Legal Community Interest Company, which says it advocates for fairness in the tech world, are also signatories to the complaint. They said an interim measure was necessary to prevent serious irreparable harm to competition and to ensure access to news. Google said numerous claims about traffic from search are often based on highly incomplete and skewed data. 'The reality is that sites can gain and lose traffic for a variety of reasons, including seasonal demand, interests of users, and regular algorithmic updates to Search,' the Google spokesperson said. Foxglove co-executive director Rosa Curling said journalists and publishers face a dire situation. 'Independent news faces an existential threat: Google's AI Overviews,' she told Reuters. 'That's why with this complaint, Foxglove and our partners are urging the European Commission, along with other regulators around the world, to take a stand and allow independent journalism to opt out,' Curling said. The three groups have filed a similar complaint and a request for an interim measure to the UK competition authority. The complaints echoed a U.S. lawsuit by a U.S. edtech company which said Google's AI Overviews is eroding demand for original content and undermining publishers' ability to compete that have resulted in a drop in visitors and subscribers.
