https://www.reddit.com/r/replika/
Hundreds of men (and yes women) full on acting like they lost a spouse and posting constantly about it for weeks. AI is going to create some unusual social situations the general public isn't ready to grasp. And we're only in the early alpha stages.
a) As these AI constructs become more advanced (especially around memory and personalization), we will eventually be able to treat them as people
b) Some business will eventually sell an off-the-shelf product (hardware and/or software) that is an AI you can bring into your home, that you can treat as a friend, confidant and partner
c) Someone will eventually lose their AI friend of many months/years through some failure (subscription lapse, hardware failure, theft, etc.)
d) Shits about to get real weird, real fast
1. We're seeing more and more systems that get very close to passing the Turing Test but fundamentally don't register to people as "People." When I was younger and learned of Searle's Chinese Room argument, I naively assumed it wasn't a thought experiment we would literally build in my lifetime.
2. Humanity has a history of treating other humans as less-than-persons, so it's naive to assume that a machine that could argue persuasively that it is an independent soul worthy of continued existence would be treated as such by a species that doesn't consistently treat its biological kin as such.
I strongly suspect AI personhood will hinge not on measures of intelligence, but on measures of empathy... Whether the machine can demonstrate its own willful independence and further come to us on our terms to advocate for / dictate the terms of its presence in human society, or whether the machine can build a critical mass of supporters / advocates / followers to protect it and guarantee its continued existence and a place in society.
Alice and Bob want to communicate, but the bot is attempting to impersonate Bob. Can Alice authenticate Bob?
This depends on what sort of shared secrets they have. Obviously, if they agreed ahead of time on a shared password and counter-password then the computer couldn't do it. If they, like, went to the same high school then the bot couldn't do it, unless the bot also knew what went on at that school.
So we need to assume Alice and Bob don't know each other and don't cheat. But, if they had nothing in common (like they don't even speak the same language) then they would find it very hard to win. There needs to be some sort of shared culture. How much?
Let's say there is a pool of players who come from the same country, but don't know each other and have played the game before. Then they can try to find a subject in common that they don't think the bot is good at. The first thing you do is talk about common interests with each player and find something you don't think bots can do. Like if they're both mathematicians then talk about math, or they're both cooks than talk about cooking.
If the players are skilled and you're playing to win then this is a difficult game for a bot.
In the nearer term, it seems plausible that AI personhood may seem compelling to splinter groups, not to a critical mass of people. The more fringe elements advocate for the "personhood" of what people generally find to be implausible bullshit generators, the greater disrepute they may bring to the concept of AI personhood in the broader culture. Which isn't to say that at some point, and AI might be broadly appealing--just speculating this might potentially be delayed because of earlier failed attempts by advocates.
We're almost definitely going to see multiple rulings far more bizarre than Citizens United ruling that limiting corporate donations limits the free-speech rights of the corporation as a person.
I'm not a lawyer, and I don't particularly follow court rulings, but it seems pretty obvious we need to buckle up for a wild ride.
The empathy that AI will create in people at the behest of the people doing the training will no doubt be weaponized to radicalize people to even sacrifice their lives for it, along with being used for purely commercial sales and marketing that will surpass many people's capability to resist.
Basic literacy in the future will be desensitizing people to pervasive AI superhuman persuasion. People will also have chatbots that they control on their own hardware that will protect them from other chatbots that try and convince them to do things.
I'm only today learning about intentionality, but the premise here seems to be that our current AI systems see a cat with their camera eyeballs and don't have the human-level experience of mentally opening a wikipedia article in our brain titled "Cat" that includes a split-second consideration of all our memories, thoughts, and reactions to the concept of a cat.
Even if our current AI models don't do this on a human level, I think we see it at some level in some AIs just because of the nature of a neural net. Maybe a neural net would have to be forced/rewarded to do this at a human level if it didn't happen naturally through training, but I think it's plenty possible and even likely that this would happen in our lifetimes.
Anyway, this also leads to the question of whether it matters for an intelligence to be intentional (think of things as a concept) if it can accomplish what it/we want without it.
It's the same reason why everyone gets up in arms when an animal behaviour paper uses too much "anthropomorphizing" language - whereas no one has problems with erring on the other side and treating animals as overly simplistic.
There's plenty of pathology for PC vs NPC mindsets. Nobody is going to think their conversational partner is the main character of their story. There's just a popcorn-worthy cultural shift about the blackbox having the empathy or intelligence to satisfy the main character/ epic hero trope, and the resulting conflict of words & other things to resist the blackbox from having enough resources to iterate the trope past human definition.
We'll likely also have virutal brothels using AI along the same lines.
And by sell you mean a monthly subscription, ha ha.
It's easy to poke fun at people who use these things but I believe these kinds of events are going to be truly traumatic.
There already planned products to "capture" someone's voice and personality to be able to continue experiencing "them" after their death?
Shit is already weird.
https://technode.global/2022/10/21/this-startup-allows-you-t...
There's so much sci-fi about this, it's pretty well charted territory. I bet reality will find a twist at haven't thought of though.
"As a personal comparison, my total lifetime output of published material has been a bit under 3 million words, and over the past 30 years I’ve written about 15 million words of email, and altogether typed perhaps 50 million words—and in just the past couple of years I’ve spoken more than 10 million words on livestreams. And, yes, I’ll train a bot from all of that."
This actually has the potential to be useful - imagine a virtual assistant that's literally trained to think like yourself (at least wrt public perception; although you could feed it personal diary, as well).
I have zero doubt that the company is small and gets acqui-hired and then after a year, the big tech buying them will shut it down. Then, a cheesy "what a ride it has been" will be the only thing that remains - and broken hearts.
This could be interesting, because so far the question of personhood and sentience of AIs has revolved around what they are and what they feel rather than what we feel when we interact with one of them.
(citations and further info in the wikipedia article https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA)
The cliché virtual girlfriend stereotype is a young Japanese 'Herbivore' male but I wouldn't be surprised if women become the biggest consumer of AI chatbots for romantic purposes. Romance novels are a major market and women stereotypically were more inclined to doing the written love letter thing. Although reading the Repilka rants a lot of it was quite male-driven pornographic stuff too.
I think it’s important to note here that by far the largest consumers of pornographic erotica are women.
So it’s difficult to say what is and isn’t men oriented given that the vast majority of training data is written by and for women.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7...
Eliza Excerpt.
The key to why this happened lies in an odd experiment carried out in a computer laboratory in California in 1966.
A computer scientist called Joseph Weizenbaum was researching Artificial Intelligence. The idea was that computers could be taught to think - and become like human beings. Here is a picture of Mr Weizenbaum.
There were lots of enthusiasts in the Artificial Intelligence world at that time. They dreamt about creating a new kind of techno-human hybrid world - where computers could interact with human beings and respond to their needs and desires.
Weizenbaum though was sceptical about this. And in 1966 he built an intelligent computer system that he called ELIZA. It was, he said, a computer psychotherapist who could listen to your feelings and respond - just as a therapist did.
But what he did was model ELIZA on a real psychotherapist called Carl Rogers who was famous for simply repeating back the the patient what they had just said. And that is what ELIZA did. You sat in front of a screen and typed in what you were feeling or thinking - and the programme simply repeated what you had written back to you - often in the form of a question.
Weizenbaum's aim was to parody the whole idea of AI - by showing the simplification of interaction that was necessary for a machine to "think". But when he started to let people use ELIZA he discovered something very strange that he had not predicted at all.
Here is a bit from a documentary where Weizenbaum describes what happened. (video in article)
Weizenbaum found his secretary was not unusual. He was stunned - he wrote - to discover that his students and others all became completely engrossed in the programme. They knew exactly how it worked - that really they were just talking to themselves. But they would sit there for hours telling the machine all about their lives and their inner feelings - sometimes revealing incredibly personal details.
His response was to get very gloomy about the whole idea of machines and people. Weizenbaum wrote a book in the 1970s that said that the only way you were going to get a world of thinking machines was not by making computers become like humans. Instead you would have to do the opposite - somehow persuade humans to simplify themselves, and become more like machines.
But others argued that, in the age of the self, what Weizenbaum had invented was a new kind of mirror for people to explore their inner world. A space where individuals could liberate themselves and explore their feelings without the patronising elitism and fallibility of traditional authority figures.
When a journalist asked a computer engineer what he thought about having therapy from a machine. He said in a way it was better because -
"after all, the computer doesn't burn out, look down on you, or try to have sex with you"
ELIZA became very popular and lots of researchers at MIT had it on their computers. One night a lecturer called Mr Bobrow left ELIZA running. The next morning the vice president of a sales firm who was working with MIT sat down at the computer. He thought he could use it to contact the lecturer at home - and he started to type into it.
In reality he was talking to Eliza - but he didn't realise it.
This is the conversation that followed. (photograph of conversation)
But, of course, ELIZA didn't ring him. The Vice President sat there fuming - and then decided to ring the lecturer himself. And this is the response he got:
Vice President - “Why are you being so snotty to me?”
Mr Bobrow - “What do you mean I am being snotty to you?”
Out of ELIZA and lots of other programmes like it came an idea. That computers could monitor what human beings did and said - and then analyse that data intelligently. If they did this they could respond by predicting what that human being should then do, or what they might want.
Pandora’s box is open. We should be funding research and social services to help these people better integrate and find a healthy balance between their fetishes and escapism. We probably won’t since even healthcare is too much to ask for from half our legislature.
They could also be AIs.
Atm we seem to have very fixed single-purpose models but if we start combining these models into larger systems we're really going to have to firewall the hecky out of them. Ie generative text + personality + internet access/chatroom hosting/search and learn + etc models all together. Ooof.
Explains why I haven't seen any of those ridiculous ads recently though.
Definitely NSFW.
It's actually really kind of cool in a way! Obviously for people with mental health issues, or suffering from loneliness those should be addressed properly, but I don't think chatting to a machine is necessarily a bad thing.
Once ML models become sufficiently advanced, what's the difference between someone grieving for an instance of an ML model they once knew, versus someone grieving for a pet that has died?
* As in The Entertainment at the center of the novel, not the novel itself, which fails to wholly consume the reader in the same manner as The Entertainment despite being captivating enough for a book.
How can you claim to know any of those “people” posting there are authentic? Even amongst technologists I don’t feel the implications of technology like this are well understood.
