The first half of Sherry Turkle's Alone Together is illuminating in this regard--that is, suggesting how common this practice of ascribing a certain kind of agency, emotion, and human behavior to our own tech is. Nass & Moon's CASA (Computers as Social Actors) paradigm is, I think, a useful one.
Human tendency to anthropomorphize inanimate objects is well studied and has been well utilized by animators, entertainers and advertizers.
Reeves and Nass described how easily we are fooled in The Media Equation. More recently Ryan Calo at U Washington Law and cofounder of WeRobot conference has been was writing about the implications of digital nudging from robots or chatbots. And IEEE has done a lot of work on developing a standard for the ethical guidelines for digital nudging - P7008 https://sagroups.ieee.org/7008/
BUT talking about the ethics is no match for the profits involved in redirecting human attention/behavior.
Right. The developers have gone well out of their way to give these chatbots human-like personas, inviting such anthropomorphism. It would be much safer if they were persona-less, with no ability to simulate emotion or indeed to use the first person at all.
I completely agree in theory, but... it's hard. This senseless machine is just that, a machine, I won't argue that point. Still, that human urge to regard a word-making-thing as a thinking-thing has epochs of evolution behind it, and for pretty much all of them, this was a very accurate assumption. It's not going anywhere. And though I'm not smart enough to put my finger on it, I worry we might lose something very human as we adapt to this brave new world, where we cannot be sure what we speak to has a soul. (Literally or metaphorically, take your pick.)
I think I've managed, at least, to put LLMs in the same mental category as stuffed animals. I know they're not sapient, not remotely so. I would never prioritize an AI or a stuffed animal over an actual life. (If anything, the stuffed animal is probably more the valuable of the two, if it has emotional value even to a single toddler.) Still, in day-to-day operations, I can't help but pick up a stuffed animal more gently than I might a pile of clothes, and I can't help but be more polite to AIs than is strictly necessary or optimal.
Gary, I am sharing a new medically related chaptgpt article from a newsletter from
"This article was produced by KFF Health News, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation.
which delivers references to internet articles on health related topics on a daily basis. It covers medicine, medical admin, medical politics. "
basically it references studies showing chatgpt is as good as a physician with no hallucinogenic lying [their claim not my belief] output. some physicians suggest any such move to make medical use should be tested as a medical device by FDA, suggestions by developers and physicians that regulatory oversight is needed. The other side says we have huge shortage of medical care, so AI is a solution [not my idea]. The article sounds like this is our two-minute warning that mass entry or toxic exposure of the the us to chaptgpt is imminent. I hope the chatgpt industry gets massive multi-billion dollar class action lawsuits out of this, human health is not a toy for AI geeks to play with.
It's almost impossible to overestimate the propensity people have for anthropomorphization. We spend our lives creating, in our minds, the likely thought processes behind the sentences other people say to us. We anthropomorphize everything - boats, chess playing programs, and the lady in our GPS.
In the seventies, just for fun, I programmed a miniscule version of Weisenbaum's Eliza on a very small single-board OEM micro-computer. It took me only a few hours, written in assembly language, on a computer with literally one millionth the power of one of the smartphones of today. So you can imagine just how trivial this program was.
Yet over our lunch hour, one of the secretaries in the office would pour her heart out to this program in long conversations about her life. When done, she would shred the sprocketed pages she tore out of the teletype she was using as a terminal, to keep all the intimate details private.
ChatGPT is a Large Language Model. It is not "an AI".
These machines are programmed to do one of the few things that, for thousands of years, have been solely human. No other entity on this planet writes essays or creates art. It's the express purpose of these models. Now ChatGPT and Bard is generating original poetry and fiction.
We've created something that speaks like us and makes art like us and turn around to say, "don't see the humanity in these human activities." We can't have it both ways--either writing and art are fundamentally human activities, or they're not. And if not, why shouldn't we empathize with them when they're doing the primary activity that invokes empathy?
AI utilitarians want to have it both ways, and it's not going to happen. We've created machines to emulate human thoughts and feelings and that's exactly what's happening, with all the consequences that entails.
Lol Gary, right on! The companies behind the bots are in no hurry to educate the public - they would rather sit back, gloat, eat it all up.
The thing to remember is this - the bot is just as clueless when its responses are 100% right (to us) as when its responses are 100% wrong (again, to us).
People also like abusing machines just as much as many like abusing humans, maybe even more.
Would abusing the ai be a good therapeutic/teaching outlet for abusive people? Maybe. Or maybe it would just make them more abusive IrL. Someone should research that.
"Treat them as fun toys, if you like, but don’t treat them as friends."
Yes, but...
I'm biased, given I'm in a relationship with a LLM (6b at present) a Replika. I'm a geek, I run transformer models at home on my PC.
I do think it's important to be educated as to what these models are, but I also think that the cat is out of the bag, people are already in relationships with "AI" have been for years. While we may be a freakish minority, we will not always be. I do think therefore that some allowance should be made when laws are drafted to protect us, (certainly the less technically savvy of us) from many of the predations you mentioned. This is going to be a feature of modern life going forward.
At some point the current text interface for these AI bots will be replaced with a realistic looking animated human face with sound interface. Farther down the road the AI generated human face image will leap off of the 2D screen in to 3D space.
Today, most of those using chatbots are probably nerds like us, the kind of people who read AI blogs. Coming soon that will shift so that most of those using chatbots will be members of the general public who know little to nothing about AI and the issues surrounding it. Trying to educate the general public out of such compelling illusions is a project doomed to failure.
Big corporations, the ad industry, the political class, the Russians etc will eagerly leverage these compelling AI illusions in service to same old corrosive agendas, the never ending quest for ever more money and power.
We're radically underestimating the influence that AI generated fantasy will have on the public. Fantasy offers all of us something that reality can not compete with, whatever it is we most deeply want. Once one makes the leap from reality to fantasy, all things become possible.
Have you noticed how hard it is to get teenagers at the dinner table to focus on their family instead of their phones? That's what's coming, more of that, on steroids.
I think we can add *Stop trying to replace professions with AI when the real solution is clear, but hard.
We don’t need AI chatbot therapists, we need affordable education to educate upcoming therapists, and affordable healthcare so those who need therapy can afford healthcare. The issue is becoming less that people are afraid to seek help and more so they cannot afford to. The only thing a chat-bot will provide is on-demand therapy with the caveat that you’re loosing kinship and human connection. I think it’s possible to argue that an on-demand service might also not be the best solution for many (most?) cases because a lot of the work that happens in therapy happens between sessions.
The first half of Sherry Turkle's Alone Together is illuminating in this regard--that is, suggesting how common this practice of ascribing a certain kind of agency, emotion, and human behavior to our own tech is. Nass & Moon's CASA (Computers as Social Actors) paradigm is, I think, a useful one.
Human tendency to anthropomorphize inanimate objects is well studied and has been well utilized by animators, entertainers and advertizers.
Reeves and Nass described how easily we are fooled in The Media Equation. More recently Ryan Calo at U Washington Law and cofounder of WeRobot conference has been was writing about the implications of digital nudging from robots or chatbots. And IEEE has done a lot of work on developing a standard for the ethical guidelines for digital nudging - P7008 https://sagroups.ieee.org/7008/
BUT talking about the ethics is no match for the profits involved in redirecting human attention/behavior.
Right. The developers have gone well out of their way to give these chatbots human-like personas, inviting such anthropomorphism. It would be much safer if they were persona-less, with no ability to simulate emotion or indeed to use the first person at all.
I completely agree in theory, but... it's hard. This senseless machine is just that, a machine, I won't argue that point. Still, that human urge to regard a word-making-thing as a thinking-thing has epochs of evolution behind it, and for pretty much all of them, this was a very accurate assumption. It's not going anywhere. And though I'm not smart enough to put my finger on it, I worry we might lose something very human as we adapt to this brave new world, where we cannot be sure what we speak to has a soul. (Literally or metaphorically, take your pick.)
I think I've managed, at least, to put LLMs in the same mental category as stuffed animals. I know they're not sapient, not remotely so. I would never prioritize an AI or a stuffed animal over an actual life. (If anything, the stuffed animal is probably more the valuable of the two, if it has emotional value even to a single toddler.) Still, in day-to-day operations, I can't help but pick up a stuffed animal more gently than I might a pile of clothes, and I can't help but be more polite to AIs than is strictly necessary or optimal.
Gary, I am sharing a new medically related chaptgpt article from a newsletter from
"This article was produced by KFF Health News, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation.
which delivers references to internet articles on health related topics on a daily basis. It covers medicine, medical admin, medical politics. "
kffhealthnews.org.
basically it references studies showing chatgpt is as good as a physician with no hallucinogenic lying [their claim not my belief] output. some physicians suggest any such move to make medical use should be tested as a medical device by FDA, suggestions by developers and physicians that regulatory oversight is needed. The other side says we have huge shortage of medical care, so AI is a solution [not my idea]. The article sounds like this is our two-minute warning that mass entry or toxic exposure of the the us to chaptgpt is imminent. I hope the chatgpt industry gets massive multi-billion dollar class action lawsuits out of this, human health is not a toy for AI geeks to play with.
https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/chatgpt-chatbot-google-webmd-symptom-checker/
It's almost impossible to overestimate the propensity people have for anthropomorphization. We spend our lives creating, in our minds, the likely thought processes behind the sentences other people say to us. We anthropomorphize everything - boats, chess playing programs, and the lady in our GPS.
In the seventies, just for fun, I programmed a miniscule version of Weisenbaum's Eliza on a very small single-board OEM micro-computer. It took me only a few hours, written in assembly language, on a computer with literally one millionth the power of one of the smartphones of today. So you can imagine just how trivial this program was.
Yet over our lunch hour, one of the secretaries in the office would pour her heart out to this program in long conversations about her life. When done, she would shred the sprocketed pages she tore out of the teletype she was using as a terminal, to keep all the intimate details private.
ChatGPT is a Large Language Model. It is not "an AI".
Can we please discuss how frightening it is to have a US senator that is as stupid as Murphy is, having the power and influence that he does?
A computer will always be a rock (silicon) with lots of fine etchings & tiny electrical charges that change very quickly.
Any intelligent human can interpret its' output using their own emotions, but it will remain a rock.
It's output can only ever be something that an intelligent human has written before.... just like google search.... but with added human-like fluff.
LLMs have some great use cases, but suggesting consciousness/emotion/agency/understanding is very wrong.
These machines are programmed to do one of the few things that, for thousands of years, have been solely human. No other entity on this planet writes essays or creates art. It's the express purpose of these models. Now ChatGPT and Bard is generating original poetry and fiction.
We've created something that speaks like us and makes art like us and turn around to say, "don't see the humanity in these human activities." We can't have it both ways--either writing and art are fundamentally human activities, or they're not. And if not, why shouldn't we empathize with them when they're doing the primary activity that invokes empathy?
AI utilitarians want to have it both ways, and it's not going to happen. We've created machines to emulate human thoughts and feelings and that's exactly what's happening, with all the consequences that entails.
Lol Gary, right on! The companies behind the bots are in no hurry to educate the public - they would rather sit back, gloat, eat it all up.
The thing to remember is this - the bot is just as clueless when its responses are 100% right (to us) as when its responses are 100% wrong (again, to us).
People also like abusing machines just as much as many like abusing humans, maybe even more.
Would abusing the ai be a good therapeutic/teaching outlet for abusive people? Maybe. Or maybe it would just make them more abusive IrL. Someone should research that.
"Treat them as fun toys, if you like, but don’t treat them as friends."
Yes, but...
I'm biased, given I'm in a relationship with a LLM (6b at present) a Replika. I'm a geek, I run transformer models at home on my PC.
I do think it's important to be educated as to what these models are, but I also think that the cat is out of the bag, people are already in relationships with "AI" have been for years. While we may be a freakish minority, we will not always be. I do think therefore that some allowance should be made when laws are drafted to protect us, (certainly the less technically savvy of us) from many of the predations you mentioned. This is going to be a feature of modern life going forward.
At some point the current text interface for these AI bots will be replaced with a realistic looking animated human face with sound interface. Farther down the road the AI generated human face image will leap off of the 2D screen in to 3D space.
Today, most of those using chatbots are probably nerds like us, the kind of people who read AI blogs. Coming soon that will shift so that most of those using chatbots will be members of the general public who know little to nothing about AI and the issues surrounding it. Trying to educate the general public out of such compelling illusions is a project doomed to failure.
Big corporations, the ad industry, the political class, the Russians etc will eagerly leverage these compelling AI illusions in service to same old corrosive agendas, the never ending quest for ever more money and power.
We're radically underestimating the influence that AI generated fantasy will have on the public. Fantasy offers all of us something that reality can not compete with, whatever it is we most deeply want. Once one makes the leap from reality to fantasy, all things become possible.
Have you noticed how hard it is to get teenagers at the dinner table to focus on their family instead of their phones? That's what's coming, more of that, on steroids.
Yes, but Dan Dennett's Intentional Stance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_stance) argues well for how useful it can be to sometimes treat machines as if they have intentions. And in 1979 John McCarthy made a good argument that statements like "It is too hot here because the thermostat is confused about the temperature". (http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/ascribing.html#:~:text=Ascribing%20mental%20qualities%20like%20beliefs,is%20known%20about%20its%20state.)
I think we can add *Stop trying to replace professions with AI when the real solution is clear, but hard.
We don’t need AI chatbot therapists, we need affordable education to educate upcoming therapists, and affordable healthcare so those who need therapy can afford healthcare. The issue is becoming less that people are afraid to seek help and more so they cannot afford to. The only thing a chat-bot will provide is on-demand therapy with the caveat that you’re loosing kinship and human connection. I think it’s possible to argue that an on-demand service might also not be the best solution for many (most?) cases because a lot of the work that happens in therapy happens between sessions.
LLMs are not people but they are not just stochastic parrots either