Shannon Vallor.– Director of the Centre for Technomoral Futures in Edinburgh Futures Institute. [Based on the ideas of her new book, The AI Mirror.]
OpenAI recently announced GPT-4o: the latest, multimodal version of the generative AI GPT model class that drives the now-ubiquituous ChatGPT tool and Microsoft Copilot. The demo of GPT-4o doesn’t suggest any great leap in intellectual capability over its predecessor GPT-4; there were obvious mistakes even in the few minutes of highly-rehearsed interaction shown. But it does show the new model enabling ChatGPT to interact more naturally and fluidly in real-time conversation, flirt with users, interpret and chat about the user’s appearance and surroundings, and even adopt different ‘emotional’ intonations upon command, expressed in both voice and text.
This next step in the commercial rollout of AI chatbot technology might seem like a nothingburger. After all, we don’t seem to be getting any nearer to AGI, or to the apocalyptic Terminator scenarios that the AI hype/doom cycle was warning of just one year ago. But it’s not benign at all—it might be the most dangerous moment in generative AI’s development.
What’s the problem? It’s far more than the ick factor of seeing yet another AI assistant marketed as a hyper-feminized, irrepressibly perky, and compliant persona, one that will readily bend ‘her’ (its) emotional state to the will of the two men running the demo (plus another advertised bonus feature—you can interrupt ‘her’ all day long with no complaints!).
The bigger problem is the grand illusion of artificial consciousness that is now more likely to gain a stronger hold on many human users of AI, thanks to the multimodal, real-time conversational capacity of a GPT-4o-enabled chatbot and others like it ...
| Imagine having to persuade your loved one that your very imperfect, often impatient, frequently distracted, sometimes insensitive or boring self matters more than a thing that is exquisitely engineered and customized to their tastes to be tirelessly engaging and entertaining, a thing that will appear to be a new kind of person ... |
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