We owe our understanding of human behavior thanks, in part, to Bob. He spends hours some days as a subject in academic psychology studies, filling out surveys on crowd-work platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, where users perform simple digital tasks for small sums of money. The questionnaires often prompt him to recall a time he felt sad, or isolated, or something likewise morose. Sometimes typing his sob stories over and over gets “really really monotonous,” he says. So Bob asks ChatGPT to pour its simulacrum of a heart out instead.
Bob, who used a pseudonym because he fears having his account suspended, says he respects the research he contributes to
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