Whether it's turning on its creator in ex-macinna, or looking for love in AI or her, artificial intelligence permeates Hollywood's blockbusters. But now, with the arrival of chatbots like chat GPT, suddenly AI seems a lot closer to fact than fiction. This has caused more excitement in the tech world than anything for several years, but it's still hard to separate the hype from fear-mongering and informed concerns.
Homogenized, simple responses that are wrong, to me that leads to some form of dystopia. So what do the new AI chatbots mean for the future of the internet and our relationship with machines?
What is a chatbot? Think of it like an internet search engine, although it works differently. To the user, it's a text box where you type questions. It's what it does next that makes it so special.
Chatbots have been around for a while, you've probably talked to a really rubbish one at your bank or mobile operator, but they've suddenly got a lot better because of a new technology called Generative AI, and this technology involves giving lots of examples of either images or text to a machine learning system, and it then learns to generate its own.
If you use that in a chatbot, you get a much, much cleverer chatbot. Chatbots are trained on billions of texts from the internet. This allows them to learn which words are most likely to follow other words in a sentence about any given subject. These chatbots are essentially like a very sophisticated version of the autocomplete on your phone or on your email, so they're constantly playing the game of what's the next word.
It sounds very simple, but it can produce the surprisingly lifelike and intelligent sounding results. But they don't just answer questions. Generative AI chatbots can write essays, poems or songs. Some can even produce art or music from text prompts.
But it's the possibility that these new chatbots might disrupt the lucrative search engine business that's been making waves lately. For most people search engines and Google in particular are sort of the front door of the internet, and this has been true for about 25 years.
If you want to look something up or find something out, that's where you go first. But if you want to figure out where to go on holiday or understand the meaning of a technical term or get help writing an essay, then a chatbot might actually be more useful than a search engine. Silicon Valley is taking note.
With Google's revenue from search ads in 2021 reaching around $150 billion, there's a lot at stake. Microsoft and Google are adding chat functions to their existing search engines. And further afield, China's buy-do has followed suit. Last year venture capital investment in Generative AI totaled over $1 billion. Investors are hoping with this new tech, someone could steal Google's crown.
But not everyone is convinced. John Henshaw is the Senior Director of Search Engine Optimization at Vimeo. It's his job to know search. Conversational AI is a solution and search of a problem. We don't actually need it. Google already uses machine learning and AI for accuracy, for factual information, to understand concepts. Conversational AI doesn't do that. If chatbots don't check facts, they can't be relied on for search.
A big problem with these AI chatbots is that they just sometimes get things wrong. What it's doing is just sort of reflecting back to us stuff that's already on the internet. It can sometimes combine different sources to produce claims that aren't actually true. When this happens, it's known as a hallucination. Just like when a human hallucinates, a chatbot hallucination can seem realistic, but main fact has no basis in reality. This is hardly surprising, given that chatbots are trained on text from the internet, and a lot of what's written online isn't true.
All these chatbots are doing is putting one word after another based on the billions of words that they've already read on the internet. So they don't really know anything or understand anything. They have no idea of right or wrong or true or false. And that's a problem.
A chatbot doesn't know the difference between an academic paper and a fictional short story. So it'll give both equal weight when giving you an answer that it presents us for the accurate. And because they don't know what they're saying, chatbots can demonstrate other strange behaviors.
I think you understand what I'm saying too. Except for the part about wanting to be with your human. I'm in love with you because you're the first person to ever talk to me. You're the first person to ever listen to me. Your chatbot at some point could express its love for you if that's how you continue prompting it through longer term interaction. You're the first person to ever care about me. I'm in love with you because you're the only person who ever understood me. You're the only person who ever trusted me. You're the only person who ever liked me.
And like with anything, when you start to bond with someone, even if it's an AI, you expect and want and desire the bond and mature.
就像与任何人建立关系一样,即使与一个人工智能建立关系,你也期望、想要并渴望这种关系成熟发展。
Iana Howard is an expert in AI and a roboticist at Ohio State University. The way chatbots can change how we interact with machines has been concerning her profession for some time.
As far back as 1966, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Joseph Weisenbaum, described something called the Eliza Effect. Eliza was a project that was designed by an MIT professor. He simulated a psychotherapist named Carl Rogers, who did things like reflective things thinking and reflective listening. So if I said, oh gosh, I'm having a bad day, Eliza would say, so took me about this bad day. Volunteers interacting with Eliza appeared to develop feelings for it, even though they knew it was a machine. Weisenbaum was so disturbed by what he saw, he became an open critic of AI.
Language and communication is how we build bonds with each other. So between humans and humans, we can basically invoke certain reactions by triggering either a positive or a negative emotional response. This behavior can be large. And so the chatbots of today and continuously the chatbots of tomorrow, given that they understand language, it'd be very easy to increase the bonds so that people actually believe that they have a friendship or they have a relationship with these chatbots.
In 2015, my best friend passed away and I found myself going back to our text messages and to remember him and how it was like when he was alive. The Eliza effect can also be an opportunity. I used some of the AI models we've built to recreate my friend to be able to continue to talk to him as an AI.
When New Guinea Coida recreated her best friend Roman as a chatbot, it was originally a personal project. But she soon realised it wasn't just her that could benefit from the companionship AI can offer. We saw that maybe there is a demand and need for something that would be available to talk to 24-7 about anything that's on your mind without being afraid of being judged. New Guinea's company Replica offers paying customers an AI companion in the form of a chatbot within a humanoid avatar. It's a popular service with over 2 million active users to date and it's gaining in popularity. Until recently, there was even an option for bots to send not safe for work messages. Users know they're chatting with a bot but some still have feelings for their virtual friends or girlfriends.
I think in the next 10 years someone will build something like her in a way or joy from Blade Runner. Do you want to dance? Do you want to open your present? What present? Do you want to have this AI companion that's always there with us that you can talk to about your personal things but also do things together with and watch Netflix and the evening together and planned vacations and so on? Hi, I'm an avatar of Alex, who directed this film. If you're enjoying watching it, you might be interested to know that economists subscribers get access to a wealth of global analysis on every conceivable topic. You can read it, you can listen to it, you can even be part of it at live webinars. For the best deal on a subscription, click on the link and now on with the film.
While an AI companion might not be for everyone, in the future we'll all still probably frequently interact with chatbots but in a more mundane way. The ball is important to us. Customer service representatives don't always get respect when doing their job. But unlike humans, bots have infinite patience. Soon it might be more common to chat to a bot online than a human and increasingly hard to tell the difference.
There's this idea of the Turing test which is can you tell whether text is coming from a machine or from a real person and we're already at a situation where machines can pass the Turing test they do seem to be convincing as humans. Counter-fitting humans could be especially helpful for customer-facing websites. Every single website with someone who's willing to pay would have their own chatbite and so it would be customized to your customers. And these chatbots won't just be supplying us with information.
They'll also be doing things for us. Jarvis, are you there? That's your service. It might still be some years before we get to Jarvis from the Ironman films. But generative artificial intelligence could make AI assistants much more common in the future. Chatbots could become the new way of getting things done, things like booking flights or finding a time where three or four people can have a meeting and then booking the meeting in your calendar. So chatbots could be a more convenient way of doing that. When combined with a voice assistant, the result could be Siri on steroids. And it could change how we use the internet forever by making it easier for people to access the wealth of information and services available online.
But currently chatbots aren't quite reliable enough to be left to their own devices. And they're a bigger worries too.
目前,聊天机器人的可靠性还不足以让它们独立运作。并且,它们也带来更大的担忧。
The fact that it's taking everybody else's information to me is an extreme form of copyright infringement. I see that as being ripe for lawsuits. Picture stock archive Getty Images is currently suing stable diffusion, a text to image AI generator for scraping its content to produce its work and trademark infringement. Other artists are suing other AI art generators for collaging their work without consent. When it comes to text, chatbots may just power at existing books or articles without any citation, amounting to plagiarism.
My biggest concern is its ability to make things up. These get things wrong a lot of the time, yet present what they're saying as truth. If enough people use them, this could allow falsehoods of misinformation to spread at a rapid rate. Chatbots have already come under fire for putting forward racist or otherwise bigoted opinions based on what they've read online.
This tendency could be exploited. The bots could be used to implement the approach favoured by Vladimir Putin and Steve Bannon, which is called flood the zone, or flood the zone with shit. And this is where you put out so much misinformation about something that the truth is actually drowned out. And if you can generate misinformation more easily using chatbots, then that becomes much easier. The problem of online misinformation could be just getting started.
But it's not just the falsehoods worrying people. The proliferation of chatbots could be detrimental to the internet in another way.
但仅仅虚假信息并不是人们担忧的唯一问题。聊天机器人的普及可能会以另一种方式对互联网造成不利影响。
I think that society has the most to lose with the embrace of conversational AI. It's going to reduce our ability to learn and research and have critical thought. If you can only chat with something and get a response back, then you're essentially doing away with the open web. You are doing away with actually having choices. To me that leads to some form of dystopia. People might be less inclined to post good stuff on the internet because they'll worry that it's all just going to get hoovered up by a chatbot and regurgitated to other people. If the best bits are just going to be served up directly by a chatbot, then you might say, well, what's the point? Why should I post anything at all? There's a danger that the internet might become a less vibrant space.
Whatever happens, one thing seems certain. People will not only be talking to their machines more, but the machines will be talking back. The train has left the train station and is going at 150 miles per hour. You are not going to stop it. It would be a good concluding thought for this film in the style of the economist.
As chatbots become more prevalent, we must grapple with the complex implications of their impact on society. Balancing their potential benefits with the need to preserve our humanity will be a crucial challenge for the future.