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Comment by jhbadger | Hacker News Reader

Eh, this hysteria reminds me a lot of the early 1980s when people seriously believed that role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons were bad for mental health - one of Tom Hanks' early roles was in "Mazes & Monsters", a 1982 TV movie that supposedly exposed the sanity-destroying nature of RPGs. Now it looks just silly. Maybe, just as we now get that people can enjoy pretending to be an elf wizard without going insane, others enjoy pretending that a chatbot is their boyfriend and girlfriend and still be well adjusted members of society.

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Few if any of the people playing D&D actually thought they were elf wizards, or that they were doing magic, or communing with eldritch gods.

Meanwhile many if not most of the people who have chatbots as their significant other actually have that relationship, and believe it to be as real as a relationship with a human being.

The former are playing a game for entertainment, and suspending their disbelief, the latter are using a machine to satisfy emotional and psychological needs in ways that anyone would consider harmful, and having their beliefs altered by proprietary commercial software sometimes past the point of psychosis.

I think there needs actual statistical evidence (rather than sensationalist hysteria) that very many people think their chatbot lover is real. Before chatbots, there were (and still are as far as I know) phone sex lines where people paid to talk dirty to an actual person. There isn't any reason to believe that most users of sexy chatbots see them as any different from those.

It's important to ground ourselves in the differences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_linked_to_chatbots

Not to say D&D hasn't surely been linked to a few deaths as well... get a large enough sample and you'll see just about anything.

The plural of anecdote is not data - and it was exactly these sort of anecdotes that led to the anti-D&D hysteria as well. Often something else was going on - for instance "Mazes & Monsters itself was very loosely based on an incident where a child prodigy who was known to be an avid D&D player commited suicide. The media was quick to blame D&D, but further investigation revealed he was suffering depression because he realized he was gay and didn't know how to tell his conservative religious parents.

I'm not sure what you mean by anecdote. The Adam Raine case in particular was bad enough that even OpenAI admitted changes needed to be made. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/openai-changes-will-be-made-cha...

Read the complaint yourself, it contains messages from ChatGPT (unfortunately it does not provide full transcripts or even the prompts Raine used to elicit these responses): https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/ra...

You're being quick to not blame chat bot companies for carelessness in this rush to market dominance. The analogy only goes so far, DnD ultimately was not part of a post-capitalist market consolidation phase by tech barons that stands to completely reshape society.

It's important to recognize the danger AI companions can pose to individuals, because the cat is out of the bag and the paradigm is here to stay. Therefore we need to examine cases like this thoroughly in order to build safer systems.

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