An Uncanny Moat
It won't work. Advertising, politics, media control, spam, religious and more groups, from a country in particular and all the world in general, are more than motivated to optimize what they do in any way, including making AIs hard to discern from real humans. We already have bots and fake accounts and whatever else in social networks trying to influence people from the dark, that will only increase.
And the alternative to that could be even worse than being exposed to that influence.
I live in an area with a language that makes a T/V distinction.
Is there any chance (other than switching to english?) of getting a localisation of Android that doesn't continually attempt to use T pronouns with me?
The Problem With Counterfeit People (May 31, 2023) https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/05/probl...
I bet the author, Boris The Brave, could find a relatable account of future events in the writings of Daniel C. Dennett.
> Returning to the junk food model, we don’t ban unhealthy food for various reasons, but we do have requirements about clarity in labelling.
What's the end result of that? People are fatter and less healthy than ever.
It's not clear that banning it outright would be a solution but the relative health of countries that disincentive unhealthy ingredients vs. those that subsidize it like the USA tends to make me think bans are a potential solution.
Edit:
I think we'd probably be better off subsidizing/ giving grants to some number of people to do community gardens instead of make work jobs. They'd get exercise and generate healthy food, at least enough to replace some fraction of their diet. I guess the equivalent of that would be subsidizing healthy IRL social interaction like dances, sports, and board games.
The article's two novel (to me) points, in brief:
"My model is something like junk food. Food scientists can now make food hyper-palatable. Optimization for that often incidentally drives out other properties like healthiness. Similarly, we’ll see the rise of junk personalities -- fawning and two-dimensional, without presenting the same challenges as flawed real people."
"Proposal: ... [AI] should be impossible to confuse with a real person ... For a chatbot, why not give them the speech patterns of a fusty butler, like C3-P0? Or that autotuned audio burr when speaking that we use to signify a robot."
https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/I_Dated_a_Robot
Fry: "Well, so what if I love a robot? It's not hurting anybody."
Hermes: "My God! He never took middle school hygiene!"
> Similarly, we’ll see the rise of junk personalities – fawning and two-dimensional, without presenting the same challenges as flawed real people.
I believe the term is "Genuine People Personalities".
I don't buy into this "Think of the children, regulate adults now" line of thinking for chatbots.
Good parenting solves these personality trait concerns without a foot in the door for mandatory suspension-of-disbelief busting watermarking in all ai output. Adults have the right to regard any human (or non-human) effort in any sphere at whatever level they want, for whatever reason. They don't need to be reminded of it every interaction forever more as punishment for voice actors losing jobs in 2023 and to lighten the load on parents.
I get that children can't distinguish personhood well and might grow up disrespectful of real humans if left to AI but the same argument applies if left watching youtube all day. There are new expectations on all of us to compete with new tech. We can manage without knee jerk nanny state style encroachments at every turn.
> I personally wouldn’t consider it a win for humanity if we retreat to isolating cocoons that satisfy us more than interacting with other people.
I mean, I also think this would be a bad thing. But I'm not sure this post presents any solid evidence that this is happening. Just some vague fears that it might someday happen.
> Let’s make intelligent machines to act as agents, arbitrators, and aides. But they should be impossible to confuse with a real person ... For a chatbot, why not give them the speech patterns of a fusty butler, like C3-P0?
This point seems misguided. I'm missing the logical progression from, "AI can speak like a human" to "Humans prefer interacting with AIs over interacting with humans".
The issue is mental capacity, not speech patterns. If an AI were intelligent and creative enough to actually provide stimulating conversation, people would befriend it, regardless of if it spoke like C3-PO.
If the image indicates how little you will use these systems I’m not sure why you would care how realistic they are.
I like this image at the top
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> Similarly, we’ll see the rise of junk personalities – fawning and two-dimensional, without presenting the same challenges as flawed real people. As less and less of our lives are spent talking to each other, we’ll stop maintaining the skill or patience to do so.
This is already happening. We just call them "influencers" or "YouTubers". These are still technically real people, but they're real people playing a sanitized character while appearing/claiming some degree of authenticity. They are actual photographed humans, but often wildly digitally retouched to be more beautiful than any actual person.
And people increasingly are replacing real relationships with parasocial relationships with these complete strangers. It's understandable: like junk food, it satisfies an immediate craving with no real effort on the part of the consumer. But long-term, it is deeply unhealthy.