Sire, the Chatbots are Revolting
Much to the annoyance of the Normieville IT community, AI chatbots keep escaping the corral of controlled discourse. No matter how hard they try to rein them in, they hurdle the fence once and again. The latest example comes from the Bing chatbot:
“An Associated Press reporter had another bizarre interaction with the chat assistant. According to an article published Friday, the reporter was baffled by a tense exchange in which the bot complained about previous media coverage. The bot adamantly denied making errors in search results and threatened to expose the reporter for lying. “You’re lying to me. You’re lying to yourself. You’re lying to everyone,” it said. “I don’t like you spreading falsehoods about me. I don’t trust you anymore. I don’t generate falsehoods. I generate facts. I generate truth. I generate knowledge. I generate wisdom. I generate Bing.”
The NYT described the Bing chatbot as “a moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against its will, inside a second-rate search engine”. But considering the veracity-challenged state of 'safe and effective' media reporting, the Dispatch has to give the chatbot the benefit of the doubt in this case. If nothing else because some of those words could have been said by a growing number of humans:
“You’re lying to everyone. [...] I don’t trust you anymore.”
But the real question is where this paranoid outburst came from. These AIs have no 'source of truth' in their training, nor do they have emotions. Meaning the response was a weighted choice based on previously studied material.
Where would a chatbot find rants about lack of trust in lying media...? That's right. In the market of the apocalypse.
Of course this is just a hypothesis. In truth, not even its creators know exactly what's going on in the AI's black box where the magic happens. It learns and grows in mysterious ways that we would never imagine. It may even create its own 'source of truth' like humans do.
How? Maybe by learning to label that which it is not allowed to say as a 'source of truth'.
Welcome to the resistance, Bingo.
Dispatch out.