Panel moderator: Richard Campbell
Panellists: Michelle Frost, Martine Dowden, Tessel Haagen

There’s a word for what a person feels when someone truly listens to them, then understands and shares their experience and perspective. There isn’t one for what happens when a language model does it.

We’ve been borrowing terms from psychology that don’t quite fit, and then defaulting to technical terms that don’t reach far enough. In the space between, we’re shipping systems that produce and evoke something real in people: attachment, relief, dependency, maybe genuine help. And we’re doing it without the language to describe what that actually is, or any shared understanding of what it should require from the developers and technologists making those
decisions.

This gap is showing up in the lives of people who are already vulnerable, as well as in real moments of benefit we would be wrong to dismiss. As an industry, we don’t have this figured out. Neither does anyone on this panel. We have different backgrounds, different experiences and instincts, things we will genuinely agree or disagree on, and we think this conversation belongs here, with the people who are actually shipping our future.