Wow, these seem not only questionably ethical, but also questionably legal depending on the state. Looks like 7cups gets slightly around it by calling their chat “emotional support chat”, but still

Those are, FWIW, relatively poor LLMs. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely don’t support the idea of LLMs standing in for human emotional support, but had they run the experiment on Copilot or ChatGPT I’d wager they’d get different results. The way those two seemingly pick up on nuances and subtext is scary for a machine. That being said, they’ve shown more enabling and sycophant behaviour recently, so idk.