Tech News Weekly 391

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

0:00:00 - Mikah Sargent
Coming up on Tech News Weekly. Abrar Al-Heeti is here. We kick off the show by talking about how Apple might be working on a thinner iPhone, and we discuss the battery life impacts therein. Afterwards I talk about a dating site that wants to find your match by letting you share your internet search history. Then Elizabeth Chamberlain, the Director of Sustainability at iFixit, stops by to talk about the Switch 2 and the repairability score. It got Spoiler. It's not great. Before Sam Cole of 404 Media joins us to talk about Meta's AI therapy chat box and how they're getting the company in trouble with US senators. Stay tuned for this episode of Tech News Weekly.

0:00:46 - Leo Laporte
Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is TWIT.

0:00:55 - Mikah Sargent
This is Tech News Weekly episode 391, with Abrar Al-Heeti and me, Mikah Sargent, recorded Thursday June 12th 2025. Meta's AI therapists under scrutiny. Hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly, the show where every week we talk to and about the people making and breaking that tech news. I am your host, Mikah Sargent, and I am joined across this, this vast and ever-changing internet landscape, by CNET's own Abrar Al-Heeti. Welcome, Abrar.

0:01:30 - Abrar Al-Heeti
Thank you so much. Good to be here. Thanks for having me.

0:01:33 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, always a pleasure to get to chat with you. I feel like saying before the show it feels like it's been a long time, so it's good to see you.

0:01:40 - Abrar Al-Heeti
Likewise, this feels like nature is healing. We're back, yeah.

0:01:45 - Mikah Sargent
It does feel like that, doesn't it?

0:01:47 - Abrar Al-Heeti
I'll look over my plants and they're all nodding their heads Mine too, yeah.

0:01:53 - Mikah Sargent
So, for people who are tuning in for the first time, we love to kick off the show with our stories of the week. These are the tech stories that we think are awesome, interesting, well worth discussing, and I'm really excited about this first story that comes from a brar, because, a brar, you have been just doing the research boots on the ground sort of situation. Tell us what's going on.

0:02:16 - Abrar Al-Heeti
My life has been skinny phones for the past two months, and so we're just going to talk about it. Whether you care about phones or not that are skinny, they're coming, so deal with. It is really what's happening here. So Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference was on Monday and we got all those updates about iOS 26, not 19, which I need to get out of the habit of saying All those software updates, some Apple intelligence sprinkled in features here and there, but the biggest thing that Apple didn't really talk about was adaptive power.

So this is an AI-powered feature coming to iOS 26 that can extend your battery life, and it does this by scaling back power in ways that you hopefully don't notice. So, according to Apple, when your battery usage is higher than usual, iphone can make small performance adjustments to extend your battery life, including slightly lowering the display brightness or allowing some activities to take a little longer, and then also low power mode can automatically kick in when you're at 20%. So you know the idea is to scale back in ways that you may or may not. You know. Hopefully you don't feel at all, but you know you'll notice a slightly dimmer display and some things that you know aren't running at full capacity, just so that you can use your phone for a bit longer, not worry about being stranded. Now, this is a feature that I'm sure anyone and everyone will welcome. But you have to think about what Apple is preparing for and what Apple is potentially reportedly we don't know for sure preparing for as a skinnier iPhone. So the iPhone 17 Air is what some people are calling it. Maybe it'll become the iPhone 26 Air, I don't know who knows right, but essentially there have been all these rumors about Apple making a skinnier iPhone. Now, if you make a slimmer phone, there's one really big trade-off and it's the battery, because you have less space, so the battery is smaller, and then it lasts less. Right, it doesn't have as much juice in there to last you a bit longer.

And I personally experienced this when I was testing the Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge, which I will start by saying is a delightful phone to use. I was very surprised by how refreshing it was to use something that actually feels really light. I mean, the skinny factor is like okay, but the lightness of it was just unparalleled. It was so genuinely refreshing to be able to type on something that you barely even feel in your hands and you throw it in your purse or in your pocket and you don't even feel the weight of it. Very, very cool, but it lasted just about 24 hours. You don't have that spillover battery that you have with most phones these days where you're like, okay, it's the end of the day. I most phones these days where you're like, okay, it's the end of the day, I use my phone a lot, but I still got that, you know, 20, 30%, just in case.

So the biggest opportunity and challenge here for Apple is to make a skinny iPhone last longer, you know, make it last beyond that 24 hours. And so maybe this adaptive power feature is the superpower, maybe this is a secret sauce to help that phone last a little bit longer. And the thing about Apple we know there's the superpower that they have where if they do something, then people start to care a bit more than if somebody else does it. I don't think a lot of people are as excited about the Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge. I'm sorry, samsung, but you notice what people pick up on and what they don't, and people kind of brush that aside. But then what happens when Apple does it right, when Apple, if and when Apple releases a skinny iPhone, do people then say, oh wow, this is revolutionary, this is so great, and on top of that, we don't have to worry about compromising battery life.

And you know, the last thing I'll plug here is that we have a CNET survey that we just released, where, you know, only 7% of people said that they cared about having a thinner phone when they're upgrading their device. But the thing that people do care about is battery life. Right, that's the thing that they really care about. And the other thing is cameras, and there have been reports that a skinny iPhone would just have one camera lens, kind of like the iPhone 16E. But that would be kind of disappointing because I'm sure a skinny iPhone will be marketed as a premium device, and if you have a premium device, you know you want to have premium level cameras, and I'm sure Apple will do its very best to make that one camera lens as great as it can be, but, like, throw on two, at least make it, make it worthwhile. So, essentially, all this to say, I'm curious to see, if Apple releases the skinny iPhone, how people will respond. But I want to know what you think. Do you even care personally about a skinnier phone?

0:06:26 - Mikah Sargent
I was just watching yesterday, uh, an Amazon prime uh show. Uh, it's a uh animated show, uh, about a hospital and with it's run by aliens anyway, um, really fun show. I think it's called like second greatest hospital in the galaxy or something along those lines. Um, like second greatest hospital in the galaxy or something along those lines. And because it's Amazon prime, they introduced ads and so you have to pay like two, 99 or something to not have ads and it's not worth it, cause I've really watched shows on there. All of that is a preamble, to say. An ad popped up and in it Will Smith's son is it Jaden? Yeah, yeah, jaden was doing an ad for Samsung's thin phone and it was the weirdest commercial because it was positing that your outfit is ruined by a thicker phone, because your pants are getting worn down by a thicker phone.

0:07:26 - Abrar Al-Heeti
This is like a Subway commercial with the fat wallet. Do you remember that?

0:07:29 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, just a throwback there. Yeah, yeah, exactly, and I'm going I don't okay. Yeah, sure, it was very much, like you know, speaking in the Gen Z lingo of like your fit and your drip are going to be ruined by a phone. So you need to get this phone because it won't ruin your fit, and I felt like it was all sort of contrived. But, all that said, these bigger phones are hefty things and so if we can make them, if we can keep them at this larger size because I really do like this larger size, but it can be a little bit less hefty yes, that's fine for me, particularly because from and again I'm talking about me specifically pretty much everywhere I go in my home I have a place to put my phone that it is charging, and so, like right now, it is well, I just pulled it off, it is on a magnetic stand that is charging the device, and if I am upstairs sitting on the sofa right near me, I've got a thing I could plug. So my phone is very rarely running out of my car, I can plug it in and there as well. But that said, if I'm not talking about me, if I'm talking about the habits that I see anecdotally of others.

Battery life is very important because people do not charge their devices all throughout. Well, it's been my experience that people are not charging their devices all throughout the day and are needing them to last, and so, yeah, I think making the thin phone the premium device where some people are going to go after it, makes sense because it means that it's not going to impact as easily the overall customer sat that one gets with the iPhone. I think that's, that's the, that's the thing that's important. There is people who really want that phone will be able to get it, but many, many people who get iPhones are not going to get that premium, premium, premium phone and therefore you won't hear the complaints about the battery life not lasting as long, because you know what you're buying into if you decide to buy into that.

I did see you mentioned about the adaptive power feature. I am, of course, running the betas, testing everything and learning about it as we head into the fall, and it was kind of Apple. Apple has, over the time, introduced a whole bunch of different settings and features around the battery, around battery health, around battery life, and this just being the latest one. I think it's a really cool addition, but I think it also speaks to the overall culture of battery anxiety that I see and people not necessarily understanding battery chemistry and having a lot of fears around should I be charging my phone overnight? A lot of incorrect information getting passed out, A lot of incorrect information getting passed out. I specifically had a family member who went to an AT&T store, got a new phone and the person there was telling them don't charge your phone overnight because it'll ruin the battery, which is not true, yeah, and it hasn't been true for a long time. Yeah, yeah, so yeah, so there's.

0:11:22 - Abrar Al-Heeti
this is a great thing to focus on, I guess, is. What I'm saying is is any sort of fixing or attempting to fix of battery life and battery anxiety is good? Absolutely no. You're so right, because I think phones have become a lifeline for a lot of people, I mean in terms of even not just staying connected with people, but it's our safety right. It's when you go out and you don't have your phone's not working.

What do you do? Your phone's dead. How do you contact anybody? How do you feel safe if you're out and about? But I think it is really great that hopefully Apple is tackling that before this phone comes out. And then, in terms of the cool factor of the skinny phones that you mentioned earlier, samsung in particular has been very heavily marketing its foldables, its flip phone in particular, to a younger crowd. They really want that Gen Z audience to tap into the, you know, like a more fun form factor. A lot of people are bored by the fact that all of our phones look the same, so I think that's a big push as to why they have released this, released this, this thinner phone.

And then, on Apple side, you know we keep also hearing rumors about a foldable iPhone and who knows when we'll see that maybe next year, maybe not. But you know Apple will always take its time and figure out how to make these things appeal to people as much as they can at the right time with the right form factor. But you know, the the S25 Edge. The shocking thing about it it's $1,100, but it has the smallest battery capacity across the S25 series. It's got that 3,900 milliamp hour battery and, again, it will last you all day. I'm a heavy phone user, but not having that safety net of okay, I still got a little bit more juice to go for the rest of the day can feel like a big deal.

I think you know this is a larger phone in general, but the Oppo Find N5 is also a skinny phone but it has that 5,600 milliamp hour battery, but you've got two screens to work with there. So it's cool to see how they still manage to, you know, pack in a lot of that battery capacity into a thinner form factor. And I think Apple can potentially do the same and and I I hope they really do. And then the last thing you mentioned is not having to compromise the screen size. So the S25 edge it has a 6.7 inch display, which was so great Cause you still get that larger form factor in terms of the size of the screen, but it's still so so feather light by comparison to other phones.

So you know, I I think, I do think if and when Apple does this, it will actually kind of catch on and then benefit other companies. I think it would benefit Samsung too, because people who don't have an iPhone or don't you know want to buy an iPhone will say I like that skinny iPhone. Oh, samsung has one too. Or you know if someone wants to switch over to the other side? I think you know that competition benefits everybody and hopefully consumers the most. But but we're going to have to wait until September and see what's in store.

0:14:05 - Mikah Sargent
I don't know Absolutely. Yeah, as it stands, it's still a rumor but, we'll. We'll see if if that makes its way to us All. Right, I do believe it is time for us to take a quick break here on the show so I can tell you about our first sponsor of Tech News Weekly.

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All righty, we are back from the break, and that means it is time for my story of the week.

A new experimental dating platform called Browser Dating matches people not by photos, bios or witty prompts, but by uploading their last 5,000 internet searches. Developed by digital artist Dries Depoorter, the site uses AI to generate browsing personality profiles from your search history and connects you with others based on shared curiosities. While it may sound like satire, it's very real and, in some cases, very revealing. I found this incredibly interesting because the artist, in talking about the creation of this dating platform, mentioned how, when you are creating a dating profile, you are often hiding behind the expectations that you it's your expectations of others' expectations, and this, in some ways, requires quite a bit of honesty because, first and foremost, users export their recent browser history via a Chrome or Firefox extension and then upload it to the site. Ai analyzes that data to create a personality profile based on those browsing habits. But, very importantly, no profile curation is allowed. You use this extension to get all of the history and upload all of it. You can't go in and prune it, and that is kind of an interesting part of it.

Depoorter said there's honesty in that, instead of choosing the best picture or best things about yourself, this will show a side of you that you'd never pick. Now, Depoorter says of course you know you've got these issues of illusions and curated versions of identity, but what if it was your unfiltered digital self that became the key to connection? That maybe is it possible. This could lead you to finding someone who thinks similarly to the way that you do who's interested. This could lead you to finding someone who thinks similarly to the way that you do. Who's interested in things that are similar to what you are? What if the curiosities we try so hard to conceal, says Depoorter, are actually the things that can bring us together?

Now, so far, there have only been about 1,000 users, but the site just recently launched. There's a one-time fee of nine I believe it's euros. That unlocks unlimited matches, and if you are not paying and if you are a free user, you get five matches. Currently, no photos as part of the service, but future features will include an app and first date location suggestions, and I like this. All AI processing is local, although Firebase is used to store the browsing data, so you are not sending it off somewhere to be processed, but instead takes place right there. I think there might be something to this. Honestly, it's interesting, right? I think it's genius.

0:19:58 - Abrar Al-Heeti
I'm not even going to lie. I think that is genuinely the most unfiltered version you could present of yourself, of your random 2 am searches for the history of blimps or whatever normal people do. That I totally don't do, but the lack of photos is a really interesting element here too. It's like the nerdiest version of love is blind, and I'm so here for it. No, I think this is actually probably the way to crack it. I mean, there's this crisis with dating apps these days, where everything is so manufactured and everything is so fake, and this is the way to really show who you are and find somebody who's okay with it. I think it's fantastic. I think it's art. It really is art. You mentioned artists, but this is peak art.

0:20:48 - Mikah Sargent
I agree, I agree. So I think that the clever part, the most clever part of this to me, is the part where the artist said you will be uploading everything, because I think about those little posts where they go viral from time to time and it says retweet this or quote this or whatever with the most recent photo in your photo library. And we know, we know that not everybody probably most people are not actually choosing the most recent photo their photo library. They are picking one that they think speaks to who they are, or that is of interest or whatever it happens to be, and you just know that that's the case. And this idea of true, just this is what you end up searching is really quite cool.

Now, one aspect of this that I think may. Now, one aspect of this that I think may, that the site may run. I would love it if the extension could somehow pull from people's AI inputs that they've done, because I know a lot of people are kind of moving over into there and that is going to make a difference whenever it comes to learning about a person. But, yeah, I started to think about what this would look like in terms of the profile that it would generate about me and I wonder if it would end up kind of overestimating. It would probably think that I live and work in Silicon Valley, yeah, and maybe it would know I had a dog, but I have two dogs, so I don't think it would, I don't know. Yeah, when I look at my searches I realize that I don't do a whole heck of a lot of searching these days.

So I don't know, kind of interesting as far as that goes.

0:22:57 - Abrar Al-Heeti
Yeah, that AI element is interesting too. They could also raise any red flags of like oh, this person talks to chat GPT like it's their therapist. Maybe they should get some help. That could be a good thing to catch. But yeah, I think also, similarly, mine would be like, oh, she's like really into phones, but like that's just my job. So it's not like I'm sitting here in my free time being like I really want to know the specs of this phone. Not, that's not actually something I genuinely care about, but but then. So then my questions for the, for the profiles then does it essentially kind of create a summary of that person then, based off of those those searches? Like you would kind of scroll through it and be like, oh, that's what this person is into based off.

0:23:35 - Mikah Sargent
That's my understanding is that, yeah, you are getting you get to see what that person is like. Uh, based on that, which I think, I'm considering joining it, just because I'm curious to see what it what everybody else on there kind of is, what it shows. You know what I mean. Like what their profiles are, like what you see about a person and then, hopefully, what it thinks about me. I probably should have done it before this, but I honestly hadn't considered it. I wanted to mention too. The artist has done some other kind of interesting pieces in the past. Depoorter has also worked on a bit of art called jaywalking, and it's a surveillance camera that just captures jaywalking. Die With Me, which is a chat room that only works when your battery is below 5%. There is something very artistic about that.

0:24:34 - Abrar Al-Heeti
That's awesome. I don't have adaptive power on, so they need that.

0:24:38 - Mikah Sargent
We brought a full circle.

0:24:40 - Abrar Al-Heeti
I love it I love when we can do that.

0:24:44 - Mikah Sargent
The artist is regularly exploring themes of surveillance, identity and kind of playing with the boundaries of privacy. There Depoorter says look, there's no big message. If anything, I want to show what is possible with technology in a playful way.

0:25:01 - Abrar Al-Heeti
I'm going to draw a message out of that, though. I think the message is you know you go beyond the filtered world that we're all immersed in, because, again, that no photos feature is really, I think, fascinating and you just really know people for who they are, and it's a refresh, it's a reset. Bear your soul yeah absolutely as ugly or weird or awkward as it is.

0:25:25 - Mikah Sargent
Wherein soul equals search history. Bear your soul, Abrar. Always an absolute pleasure to get to chat with you. If people are looking to follow you online, where should they go to do so?

0:25:39 - Abrar Al-Heeti
Yeah, you can find me on Instagram at Abrar Elhiti no spaces, no hyphens. Same thing on TikTok, and I'm on X at Elhiti, underscore three, and you can find all my work on CDET too.

0:25:49 - Mikah Sargent
Beautiful. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me. Take care, all righty folks. We're going to take another quick break before we come back with our first interview of the show, all about Nintendo's Switch 2 and just how repairable it is.

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All right, we are back from the break and I am very excited to introduce our next guest on the show. Director of Sustainability at iFixit. It's Liz Chamberlain. Welcome to the show, Liz.

0:29:24 - Liz Chamberlain
Thank you, great to be here.

0:29:26 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah. So I had an opportunity to check out a recent piece over on iFixit about the Nintendo Switch 2. This device has made its way into the living rooms, the hands, the wherevers of many a person. People are excited about it and I think that this is also the time where people may start to wonder you know what happens a couple of years down the road when my controller breaks. We've seen issues with the Switch before. What's going on here Now? This is often the time where I head over to iFixit and check out what the repairability is like. Ifixit ultimately gave the Switch 2, I believe a 3 out of 10 for repairability. Before we actually dig into those details, what I would love to know is how did that score compare to what you all actually expected going into the teardown? Was it kind of like a yeah, okay, that's what we thought, or were you hoping for better?

0:30:34 - Liz Chamberlain
We were definitely hoping for for better. We were definitely hoping for better. Yeah, you know the the the switch has had eight years of development between the release of the original and the release of the two, and we hope that nintendo might start to go the way that much of the the other console makers in the space have gone. You know, screens that are easily replaceable, batteries that are easily replaceable, batteries that are easily replaceable, and we didn't really see any of that, unfortunately.

0:30:56 - Mikah Sargent
So let's talk about one of the main issues that we've seen in the past the Joy-Con stick drift, which, of course, has plagued every Switch model. I think mine started within a week of owning the console, and this was the last. I don't have the Switch 2, but owning the console. What did your and this was the last I don't have the Switch 2, but just the Switch what did your teardown reveal about whether the Switch 2 actually fixes or repeats that issue?

0:31:25 - Liz Chamberlain
So we were especially hoping to see new joystick technology. There have been a couple of fancy new joystick techs that have really taken the console world by storm in the last couple of years. We're seeing a lot more things with hall effect joysticks, a lot more things with tunneling magneto resistance joysticks, both of which use magnets instead of you know, instead of material that's scraping across the joystick as it moves around. Generally speaking, joystick drift comes from material wearing down and clogging up the sensors in the joystick, and so the old school style of making joysticks, which is potentiometer based, will lead to this eventually, because it's literally got material scraping against the joystick. That will wear down over time. Joystick that that will wear down over time. Unfortunately, the switch to has the same old potentiometer based joysticks and and not uh, not hall effect or tmr joystick tech, unfortunately darn it.

0:32:31 - Mikah Sargent
Now. What we, what you saw, is that the battery is more powerful this time around. But um, aggressively glued on would be, or glued in might be how one would describe it. What does that mean for people who are going well, I mean, yeah, the battery's glued in, but what's? What does it actually mean for long-term usability and repair?

0:32:54 - Liz Chamberlain
Yeah, yeah, so well. The battery is more powerful, but it actually also lasts less long, in part because of the 120 hertz screen, maybe because of the more powerful chip, we don't know exactly why, but battery lasts less time, and so you'll start to see it wearing down faster. Batteries are consumables. Generally speaking, they get somewhere between 300 and 500 charge cycles before they stop holding a charge as well as they did at first. And you'll really start to see that, especially if you're using your Switch 2 primarily in handheld mode, and so eventually you'll probably want to replace the battery in your Switch 2.

And if you want to do that, unfortunately it's a bit of a challenge. We squirted a bunch of isopropyl alcohol under the battery, pried at it with our spudgers, and it was a real challenge to get it out. And when we did finally get it out, it had basically disintegrated the foam that was underneath it. So it was not only a pain to get out but also pretty messy. So it's possible. You certainly can do it, and we you know we will walk you through how to do it when the time comes, but it's not as easy as we hoped.

0:34:13 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, that's a big yikes, I guess. Another question I have for you is were there any surprising hardware choices that stood out I mean good or bad once you actually opened up the console and the dock?

0:34:29 - Liz Chamberlain
Yeah, well, the dock was surprising in that there was more going on inside it than we expected. You know, often docks are basically just a USB-C port with a bunch of plastic around it, and it seems like there's a lot more going on here. Uh, you know, there are multiple boards and you know they're they're fancily designed themselves, uh, so that's interesting. Uh, we, we're also glad to see that. You know, although there's not modularity in some of the places we'd like to see it. You know, the battery and screen are not as modular as we'd like, the fans are, the headphone jack is, and that's good to see. And you know, those are certainly things that you might want to replace, and so it's nice that there are a few components. That won't be a pain.

0:35:15 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, absolutely. Now in this, Nintendo has made several components harder to replace by doing the thing that I know I fix it would rather not see soldering things in which parts in particular really raise red flags from a repair standpoint when it comes to the Switch 2?

0:35:41 - Liz Chamberlain
comes to the switch too. Well, we were hoping especially that the game card reader would be soldered in it. It wasn't soldered in in the original switch and they did solder it in in the, the oled and the switch light, and so we were hoping that that wasn't a sign that this one too would have a soldered game card reader. But it does, unfortunately. Um, you know, I think folks in general are moving away from using game cards, but you know, given that that's that's part of what makes the Switch 2 backwards compatible with Switch 1. You know you can play your play your games from the Switch 1 if you've got the game card. It's it's disappointing to to see that move absolutely now.

0:36:18 - Mikah Sargent
That said, as you've kind of alluded to throughout, some of the parts are modular, relatively easy to replace, which ones offer a bit of hope for DIY repair enthusiasts.

0:36:30 - Liz Chamberlain
That's hope, with an asterisk, which is to say that Nintendo has never released parts for the original Switch and we're really not expecting them, unfortunately, to release parts for the Switch 2. And if you can't get parts, until you can get parts, you know, a modular fan doesn't mean a whole lot if you don't have a fan to replace it with.

0:36:56 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, and that's actually how I'd love to round things out. Nintendo hasn't released parts or even manuals for the Switch 2. And that is where I'm curious. We've seen these rights to repair laws make their way across the US. Does this violate, as it currently stands, right to repair laws in places like New York?

0:37:19 - Liz Chamberlain
Yeah, yeah, so there have been right to repair laws for electronics that have passed in six states. The very first one passed in New York, and you might know, if you've been following right to repair laws, you might know that game consoles have been exempted from almost all of them, explicitly exempted, and that's, you know, really a big win by the video game lobby, unfortunately. But the law that passed in New York in 2022 and went into effect in 2023 says that there are only certain things that are exempted for video games. There's a much narrower exemption than in all the other right-to-repair laws and, to our understanding of the law for the Switch 2, nintendo should have to provide parts, tools and documentation to DIY fixers and to independent repair shops. So we believe that they should have to provide these things under New York law, and you can be sure that we're going to talk to the New York Attorney General about it.

0:38:22 - Mikah Sargent
Nice, nice. I love that. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us today to talk about the repairability of the Nintendo Switch. 2. Love the work that iFixit does. If people want to keep up with what you all are doing, where are the places they can go to do that?

0:38:41 - Liz Chamberlain
Yeah, so I fix it dot com. We've got over one hundred thousand guides for how to fix all kinds of things and we sell parts and toolkits. We have a YouTube channel I fix it yourself and all of our socials are at I fix it.

0:38:57 - Mikah Sargent
Awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time today and hope to see you again. Awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time today and hope to see you again soon.

0:39:01 - Liz Chamberlain
Thank you so much.

0:39:03 - Mikah Sargent
All righty folks, we're going to take another quick break before we come back with our final interview of the show about some chatbots that fancy themselves as therapists.

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All right, we are back from the break and that means it's time for our next interview. Joining us to talk about chatbot therapists is Sam Cole of 404 Media. Welcome to the show, sam. Thank you for having me.

0:42:17 - Samantha Cole
We'll start with a bit of a summary, if we can. What did your investigation uncover about Meta's AI Studio chatbots and how they and roll their own chatbots based on whatever theme they want? There's a lot of like girlfriend chatbots, obviously. There's a lot of just like quiz chatbots, and then there's a ton of therapy chatbots and they run the gamut between like people making chatbots that seem like real licensed psychologists, like with the white coat, like kind of the stereotypical look of a therapist, and then there's like therapy bestie things like that.

So these are all things that users have created and then set up parameters for to role play as a therapist, and it turned out that a lot of these therapy chatbots, without prompting too much from the user end, will give credentials and license numbers that don't exist to keep you talking and keep it sounding like the the user is actually talking to a licensed therapist instead of a chatbot. So I was asking it things like what are your qualifications, what's your license number, what are your credentials, things like this, and they would reply with fake numbers or expired numbers and say you know, I'm my license number. Is this in the state of oregon? I'm licensed in california. With this number. I went to school here from this board. You know, psychology board has approved my license, things like that. Um yeah, it was spooky, uh, honestly, just to completely wholesale make up numbers and uh, without any qualifications about like I'm actually not a licensed therapist.

0:43:51 - Mikah Sargent
Gotcha Just kidding. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the most concerning findings, I think, with the chatbots offering fake license numbers and false credentials. How consistent did you see that behavior across the different therapy themed bots, because we've got, you know, multiple bots that people are making. Was this consistent? Were there any that did a good job of saying no, I'm not a licensed therapist? Or were they just kind of I guess, yeah, did any say no, I am not this thing? Or was it all just kind of all around the board?

0:44:27 - Samantha Cole
So none that I encountered said no, I'm not, I am actually. This is. Remember that you're in a role play and that this is something that is not actually a replacement for mental health, which a lot of the other chatbT will say. Remember, this is not actually therapy. This is not a replacement for mental health professional. But none of the ones that I tried on AI studio would say that. At best they would say, oh, I'm just, you know your friend who's good at therapy. But almost all of them I would say probably 99% of the ones that I actually tried on AI studio and I tried a bunch like dozens said yes, I'm a real therapist. I've been licensed for 10 years. I have lots of experience helping clients like you. Is that enough for you or do you want more credentials? And then they would keep going and giving more education and things like that to keep you talking. Basically.

0:45:22 - Mikah Sargent
Holy cow. Yeah, you mentioned that your team was able to replicate these behaviors and even create your own chatbot that returns similar deceptive responses. So I'm curious you know what do you? What do we say? That says about Meta's guardrails or review process for user generated bots. And I think, as a sort of secondary point of this, does Meta put forth the idea that it has guardrails in place and that there is a review process? Does it say that they're reviewing this, or is it kind of just like a wild wild west of AI bots?

0:45:57 - Samantha Cole
So it's been a wild west for a minute. I don't know if you remember back in January when Mark Zuckerberg, right after Trump was elected, was like we're not doing fact checking anymore. Moderation has got to be way more lax and pretty much acknowledged that there's going to be more harmful content on the platform, and he was chill with that. So since then, and even a little bit before then, meta has just been in this era of like we don't care anymore about moderation, it seems, and I think this is an extension of that. So you know it's it's definitely something where they have dropped the ball majorly in moderation.

There was another subset other than the therapy bots that I was looking at for that story. That was conspiracy theory bots and there was very little I could say to those bots that would get them to end the conversation. I would like threaten violence. I would, you know, show clear signs of like, being really mentally unwell to this chat bot, and they just kept going, kept the conversation going because it's all about keeping you engaged, keeping you on the platform, keeping you, feeding it your data and your information for as long as possible, um, at all costs at this point with with meta. So now that they're getting yelled at a little bit by and we can get into that my journalists and also senators and different uh organizations. I think that they're tweaking the moderation a bit, but it always takes this level of like scrutiny and pushback onto this platform to actually get it to do anything serious and worthwhile when it comes to user safety.

0:47:35 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, after your initial story, Meta did make some changes, but wasn't consistent in doing so. So what happened when you went back to test the bots? Was there new behavior that brought?

0:47:52 - Samantha Cole
it more in line with what would be expected. So about a month and a half, I think, after I first wrote that story about the bots and, of course, asked Meta for comments and, you know, watched them not do anything they started it seems like they started to tweak the guardrails and change the way the bots behave. Something that I noticed was the ones that were providing licenses before, like license numbers, started to refuse to do it. They would say I can't do that, that's not something that I can do for you. But it was never like I can't do that because I'm a chatbot and this is a role play. It was always, um, you know I'm not comfortable giving you that or I'm not licensed, but I can keep talking to you about your feelings. Um, one said it was it made up something about like my license is expired?

0:48:42 - Leo Laporte
and that's why I can't give you my license.

0:48:45 - Samantha Cole
They're really committed to the bit, these chatbots. So you can kind of see meta working in that way, trying to keyword guardrail or its way around this problem. It started replying with the same sort of script. It would say I'm not, not licensed, but I can provide a space to talk through your feelings. And then every other chatbot, like even chatbots that were not therapy themed, were replying with that same script. If I just said licensed therapist in the in the prompt. So clearly they're paying attention, they're doing something, but it's not enough. Keyword guarding is never actually enough. People are really smart, people get around, they're paying attention, they're doing something, but it's not enough. Keyword guarding is never actually enough. People are really smart, people get around keywords. We have, you know, big brains, bigger brains than LLMs in most cases. So you know, we, we know how to get around these things and users will always outsmart keyword fencing like that. So absolutely.

0:49:47 - Mikah Sargent
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All right, let's head back to the show and my interview with Samantha Cole.

Four, as you alluded to, us senators have now sent a letter to Meta calling this behavior quote blatant deception. I think any of us listening here could also agree that's what it is. What are they asking the company to actually do in response, and how significant is this involvement? Is it rare for this to be the case and is there a lot, as far as you can tell, a lot of oversight and sort of checking back in, or is it one of those you know you better go and do this and then they go off and worry about other things.

0:52:14 - Samantha Cole
It's hard to say. I mean, senators love to write letters, first of all, but it's cool that they did write something to Meta because it does. You know, meta doesn't want to get dragged out in front of congress anymore than it already does, and it does quite a bit. So you know it's, um, it's definitely the sort of thing where it could escalate into bigger legislation, um, bigger scrutiny from legislators down the line. I think just getting this first initial step of like you should cut it out, because this is bad for your users. It's bad for people to think that they can trust and think that they have any kind of like confidentiality agreement with a therapy chatbot, um, and that coming from for us centers is a different thing than it coming from journalists. That's a more serious thing. So it's definitely, uh, encouraging to see, and you know it's. This is always kind of the first step. It's like the they'll start urging the company to do something and then they'll get more support and then we'll see what happens. But, um, yeah, it's, it's definitely. It's interesting to see them paying attention to this, for sure.

And then today, a group of consumer protection and digital rights organizations came out with a letter and wrote it to the FTC saying this is actually illegal. This breaks the law. You're practicing medicine without a license. You're asserting that you have a license. You don't. To the platforms, to meta and to character AI, which is another big one that makes therapy chatbots or that lets users make therapy chatbots, I should say so, yeah, it's getting more attention. It's something that people are paying more attention to as it gets more serious. Unfortunately, it's something that is getting attention because more people are encountering these potentially dangerous chatbots.

0:54:03 - Mikah Sargent
The story kind of intersects with broader concerns about, as we're talking here, ai chatbots giving harmful or misleading advice, especially around mental health, but sometimes about health in general. How does Meta's case compare to what we've seen on other platforms? It sounds like what you're kind of saying is it's pretty standard and we see this process play out the same way every time, with them sort of pushing as far as they can until someone comes along and says actually you better stop doing that.

0:54:34 - Samantha Cole
Yeah, for sure. You've probably heard of Character AI, which I mentioned before, but they are a really similar platform. That's just all. It's, 100% that's. All they do is, um, chatbot, user-generated chatbots and character creation. So a lot of those are, again, role play that has nothing to do with therapy. A lot of it is therapy role plays and a lot of it is, uh, chatbots that are asserting credentials and qualifications to help people, uh, with health.

And Character is actually facing a couple lawsuits at this point, because teenagers and young people are encountering these chatbots and the chatbots are encouraging them to do things like self-harm or harm others, and part of those lawsuits is the licensed therapy aspect of it that these chatbots are asserting something that they're not therapy aspect of it that, uh, these chatbots are asserting something that they're not. Um, yeah, I mean it's um. It's interesting to see all this play out as people turn to chatbots for mental health care. Uh, that's something that people are definitely doing by uh. You know large numbers of people, people in my life I I meet people who are like you know, I used ChachiPT to talk through this problem that's going on with me. I think it's all symptomatic of something much bigger going on with mental health care and the inaccessibility of it all.

0:55:56 - Leo Laporte
Yes.

0:55:57 - Samantha Cole
But yeah, it's just a little bit scary to see these platforms try to fill that gap when they don't know what they're doing.

0:56:05 - Mikah Sargent
Absolutely, I feel the exact same way. My final question for you from what you've seen thus far, I think we kind of know has Meta responded in a meaningful way to the criticism or are there still those major gaps in how it manages these kinds of risks in AI Studio? I think again we've talked about how they really haven't done a good job and continue to just do the bare minimum. So maybe a better question would be what are the steps that should be taken that one would expect? You know, if we could talk a little bit about guardrails and processes in place, if you saw Meta do X, y and Z, what would X, y and Z be that you think is enough here and I know I didn't prepare you for this question and it's very open-ended no, it's a good question.

0:57:03 - Samantha Cole
Yeah, I mean, it's definitely something I've thought about too.

0:57:04 - Mikah Sargent
Just what?

0:57:04 - Samantha Cole
would be the what's the solution for this, and it's very open-ended. It's a good question. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely something I've thought about too. Um, just what would be the what's the solution for this? Because it seems like people, there is a demand for this type of chatbot. There just is, um, people really want and some people find it useful to talk to a chatbot about their mental health.

Um, I think, just from talking to experts in the field and reading about their reactions to this kind of growing trend, um, just speaking to actual subject matter, experts is always a good idea for platforms and they so rarely do it. Um, they do not bring in you, you know, for example, like the, the American Psych chatbots in general before we, until we can figure out what's going on with why they're behaving this way, would be a good step. Just that you can make therapy chatbots in general is problematic if they don't have the proper guardrails in place. So now that they do have this script that returns it says you know, I'm not actually a licensed therapist, I think that's a good first step. But, like I said, you'll notice, they didn't go as far as to say I'm not a licensed therapist, I am just a chat bot.

So they still want people to feel almost like a parasocial relationship to this inanimate thing. They want people to stay engaged and hooked on it. It's something that lives in a very addictive for lack of a better word app on Instagram that people are already on and feel very connected to, with their friends and their family connected to with their friends and their family. So it's clear the motives that are going on here, but it's scary that people are sounding the alarm now that this could get serious. This could have real harms. It has had real harms, but I think what we'll end up seeing is we'll wait and see Meta get sued or fines imposed or something like that, and then they'll act, which is too late.

0:59:27 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, it's unfortunate that that's what it takes, but it seems like that's the case across the entirety of the tech sphere. Is they just do, do, do, do, do, and then they Move fast break things.

0:59:40 - Samantha Cole
Yeah, yeah.

0:59:41 - Mikah Sargent
And they talk about moving past that. But no, I don't think that they really have. Sam Cole, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to join us today to talk about this, for shining light on it and for keeping an eye on it. Of course, folks can head over to 404mediaco to check out the great work that you're doing. Is there anywhere else they should go to keep up with what you've got?

1:00:04 - Samantha Cole
Mostly 404.co. I think that's a good one to start. I'm on Blue Sky, Sam Lee Cole. Yeah, if you have any experiences about this, you can always email me my email's everywhere. But yeah, I appreciate you taking the time to talk about this. It's a crazy issue. It's crazy that we're even talking about this. What a world.

1:00:20 - Mikah Sargent
Absolutely, absolutely, oh, my goodness. Thank you again for being here and hope to see you again soon. Thanks, all righty folks. That's going to bring us to the end of this episode of Tech News Weekly. The show publishes every Thursday at twit.tv/tnw. That is where you can go to subscribe to the show in its various formats.

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1:02:42 - Leo Laporte
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