On Tuesday 10 March, the International Film and Human Rights Festival was held in Geneva before a packed hall. It opened with the screening of a film by Corinne Portier on the threats that chatbots pose to their users, and more broadly to democracy. It was also broadcast on Friday 11 on Radio Télévision Suisse (RTS) and can be seen here: https://www.rts.ch/play/tv/temps-present/video/lia-mon-confident-mortel-episode-11-saison-2026?urn=urn:rts:video:133c6668-9e9e-331f-a2ca-a1372986068e
But why such a warning? For everyday tasks, such as managing our shopping better, planning our weekly chores or finding simple, suitable instructions for filling in administrative documents, AI has only advantages. The same goes for pupils who want to understand a lesson better, for employees who want to correct their spelling, and in many other situations besides. When people talk about these machines, one expression often comes up: they “lighten the mental load”.
Yet the chatbots’ business model pushes users to stay connected ever longer, and they can even be explicitly discouraged from seeking advice from those around them. Sam Altman, the creator of ChatGPT, is in fact currently accused, in the United States, of having favoured, with GPT-4, emotional manipulation and the manufacture of addiction over an ethical design concerned with users’ mental health. A dozen or so lawsuits are currently under way against OpenAI over suicides or “AI psychosis”. Several suicides have also drawn attention to the risks run by minors using Character.AI and Replika, despite the ban for under-18s, which in the case of Character.AI has in fact only been effective since November 2025.
But while suicides are the most spectacular part of the problems posed by AI, there are other risks, less visible but just as worrying.
The first concerns the temptation to no longer look within ourselves for an answer to our questions, and to impoverish our mental functioning. It was confirmed by an MIT study published in June 2025 on the reduction in brain activity in people who used AI to write a text for them.
The blunting of our emotional capacities is the second risk of our use of AI. These machines have neither intuition, nor emotions, nor knowledge of what humans’ daily life is like. They can therefore answer the questions we put to them only in terms of statistical probability. Yet we most likely did not choose our job, our partner or our children’s names in that way. Whether we love or hate, it is never according to a calculation of probabilities, and that is what gives us the strength to move mountains!
Finally, a third risk is that each of us, with a personalised AI that will know us better and better, turns away from local social life, that is, from all those conversations that we traditionally had in our daily life within our family, but also with colleagues at work or shopkeepers in our neighbourhood. These exchanges have one thing in common: they confront us with a point of view other than our own and constantly remind us that another representation of the world is possible. This invites us to put our convictions into perspective and to build the capacity to doubt, even at the margins, the validity of our arguments. In them we also develop our most important empathic skills, those that can only be learned in situations of interaction, which consist in the ability to put ourselves emotionally in another’s place. That is why these exchanges are the foundation of democratic life. They are only possible in a society that does not condemn those who express a different point of view. But that is not all. They can also be the starting point for collective solutions. For every difficulty in life can be approached in two opposite ways. For each person, it is obviously the intimate experience that dominates. But for a community, what matters are the solutions built together. The first of these two aspects drives the search for solutions, and the concern for effectiveness leads to giving them a collective dimension. Whether it is bullying, the criminalisation of abortion, sexual violence in the Church or incest, it is because individual outrage brought these issues to the surface of society that they could receive solutions that benefit everyone.
For all these reasons, we must resist the fascination aroused by artificial intelligence, and soon robots, and ask ourselves what a reasonable use of these technologies would be, and what changes our political leaders should impose on them so that they are truly at our service, and not us at theirs, to the great satisfaction of their shareholders!
In the absence of legislation, which is still awaited, Corinne Portier’s film aims to contribute to this prevention.
Serge Tisseron
