philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

18Mar/23Off

The Real Danger of AI is How We’re Prone to Humanize It

... But these worries are – at least as far as large language models are concerned – groundless. ChatGPT and similar technologies are sophisticated sentence completion applications – nothing more, nothing less. Their uncanny responses are a function of how predictable humans are if one has enough data about the ways in which we communicate. ...

People, after all, are predisposed to anthropomorphize, or ascribe human qualities to nonhumans. We name our boats and big storms; some of us talk to our pets, telling ourselves that our emotional lives mimic their own. ...

Unfortunately, technology companies cannot always be trusted to put up such guardrails. Many of them are still guided by Mark Zuckerberg’s famous motto of moving fast and breaking things – a directive to release half-baked products and worry about the implications later. In the past decade, technology companies from Snapchat to Facebook have put profits over the mental health of their users or the integrity of democracies around the world. ...

But they are also a potentially predatory technology that can easily take advantage of the human propensity to project personhood onto objects – a tendency amplified when those objects effectively mimic human traits.

See the full story here: https://innotechtoday.com/ai-isnt-close-to-becoming-sentient-the-real-danger-lies-in-how-easily-were-prone-to-anthropomorphize-it/

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