Insight
Boureau: Flawless AI companions impair people's ability to navigate real relationships
“And if you get used to this as what a great interaction should be, then it makes you less and less able to interact with humans who have flaws, have their own needs. You have to, it's more of a give and take, and it's very healthy to learn that give and take.”
Insight
Boureau: Fact-Checking People with Committed Views Only Entrenches Them
“Basically people dig their heels and they're even more convinced of what they thought before than before you tried to reason them. If they're already like so far gone that they're very committed to the position.”
Insight
Boureau: Only Trusted Friends, Not Fact-Checkers, Can Change Minds Online
“The one kind of constituency who has a chance of Making a difference is their friends, people they already trust. So people who are already in their circles, people who have this relationship of which is usually pre-existing or it's because they're more aligne…”
Insight
Boureau: AI optimizing for immediate rewards is easiest to train
“All the systems on like that, that depend on capturing engagement on like trying to see what people do. If you try to capture that trend of the immediate reward, You're going to get a lot of it, and so it's very easy to train. If you try to say, no, I really w…”
Insight
Boureau: Effective Accountability Requires a Human Reference in the Loop
“And the thing that has been shown time and again in research is that you need some kind of accountability, and accountability works better if you have a human reference in the loop, someone who keeps you to your commitments, someone who checks in on you”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Boureau: ChatGPT readily provides bogus information on scientific topics
“ChatDpt is very happy giving you bogus information sometimes, because some people believe it's true and science is complicated”
Insight
Boureau: Online Misinformation Is a People Problem, Not a Technical One
“So that was a very long answer, but that's why for me at the end of the day, I thought this is not a technical problem. It's a people problem. And it's a psychological needs problem of how do you make sure that people feel like they have communities that they …”
Assertion Supported
Boureau: Facebook M was a hybrid AI-human system
“No, we had some, so the way I worked on the M team for a bit. So no, there was a, it was a hybrid thing. Like the AI would make suggestions and the humans were just to make sure that it was still a good quality, which a lot of the systems are still like that.”
Insight
Boureau: AI will not make self-improvement effortless
“People always look for a new technique, but we have old techniques, and I would say they're still the best we have. So AI is not going to, I mean, I'm not looking for something that suddenly makes it easy. It's always going to be a bit hard, but we already kno…”
Insight
Boureau: Humans require continuous adversity to maintain emotional resilience
“If you never get any adversity or anything that's negative, You're just going to take this for granted, and you'll just be exactly as happy as before, except now it will require a lot more to just get you to that baseline. So in a way we need to constantly get…”
Insight
Boureau: Effective goal-setting requires planning for obstacles, not just visualizing outcomes
“There's researchers at NYU who have developed the WHOOP framework, which is wish outcome obstacle plan. So showing that if you set a goal, it works better to not just visualize the outcome. But also think about all the obstacles and make a plan for what you're…”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Boureau: Meta suspended ThrivePal's Instagram account shortly after launch
“I just started like two weeks ago our Facebook page on Thrive Battle, not Instagram because Meta suspended my Instagram page, so for now it's like, Tiny.”
Disclosure
Boureau: ThrivePal is developing a game avoiding addictive immersion
“I mentioned we also want to do a game, which is not the app, like the game is not out yet, but We want to make a game. It's going to be more engaging because, you know, you have some, like, game stuff where you have in-game currency that you try to accumulate,…”
Opinion
Boureau: ChatGPT is too permissive and unopinionated to be an effective coach
“ChatGPT knows lots of good things, but ChatGPT is very permissive and not so opinionated necessarily about what's good.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Boureau: AI acts as 'bigger guns' amplifying humanity's self-destructive distractions
“We are, like, aware of the fact that we often are our worst enemy, and we shoot ourselves in the foot ourselves, and we're going to get bigger guns like, metaphorically with all this AI stuff. Which is going to make it very easy to have this tempting stuff com…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Boureau: Decades of research validate 40 to 50 well-being techniques
“There's like 40, 50 techniques that are very well established. Decades of research show that they work. And often as of these 40, 50, there's going to be two, three, four that appeal to a given person. You have to find the right one for that person.”
Disclosure
Boureau: ThrivePal is funded primarily by OpenAI and General Catalyst
“So it's funded by OpenAI and General Catalyst, mostly, and a bunch of other people.”
