Maybe chatbots shouldn't say "me" or "my"

MIT professor Sherry Turkle warns that people are becoming dangerously involved with chatbots.

His new book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines, breaks the mold. It's a polemical warning that we've reached a state of emergency where our humanity is at risk of over-reliance on soulless machines that claim to be our teachers, mentors, friends, colleagues and lovers. Turkle seeks a high bar of books—Silent Spring, The Jungle, Unsafe at Any Speed—that awaken the public to impending crises.

Basically, this little MIT professor embraces a multi-trillion dollar, government-sponsored industry eager to accelerate artificial intelligence into every corner of our personal and professional lives.

Steven Levy: Your previous books have reported the results of your research as a social scientist, often leading to disturbing conclusions about how people, especially children, interact with computers. But this book reads like you are breaking the glass and pulling the fire alarm. why the shift

Sherry Turkle: As with all my books, I went in curious. But after about 10 interviews, conducted during the pandemic, my state of mind was no longer neutral. It was terrible! These people are overwhelmed during the pandemic, their families are suffering, they call them, and they talk to me about how they really want to communicate only with their chatbot. I was not happy when I was able to interview people face to face. People don't want to do anything in politics because they just want to live in chatbot land. So the arc of the book ended like this - reality needs you. There couldn't be a worse time to give up on reality.

You write that social media has prepared us for this.

Social media has softened us by getting us used to the idea that if you're sad or blue, turn on your computer. Then he made you crazy and kept you with his own kind. But now we have this new technology that has no reason to be first person.

Do you think we should ban chatbots from using first person?

Yes! After a career of no credit as a crazy Luddite, I'm not in the mood to go all out and say all chatbots are toxic all the time. But this is very dangerous, a slippery slope. This is basically used to say that we don't need to pay for psychotherapy, we can use chatbots. In every serious interview I do, people bring up this practice myth — that you use chatbots to practice talking to your boss, your lover, and your teacher. But when you bathe in the warm soup of full acceptance [of LLMs], talking to chatbots becomes game over.

You also have issues with your reliance on chatbots at work, and a particular aversion to the term "human in the loop."

When they use the term, it means that the human is out of the production process and is there to do some sort of cleanup work, to catch illusions or things that the AI can't see. It doesn't work because employers only have a few people in the loop. These people basically cannot change anything. They're there partly so long as they sound good, they're argued, and partly to give people the false impression that the process hasn't been handed over to an AI. But it is left to an artificial intelligence.

Perhaps powerful chatbots are a new form of interaction that is not necessarily worse than human conversation, but different, as people report feeling encouraged and empowered by the positive feedback they provide.

Artificial intelligence will never replace human conversation. He's not really afraid of death, he's not afraid of sickness, he's not afraid of pain, he doesn't love his children, and he doesn't care if you kill yourself or make dinner. So if we raise our children with it, or have our most intimate conversations with it, we will lose touch.

However, many people have no one to talk to. They feel that talking to chatbots helps them.

If there is a crisis of loneliness, it is because we abandon each other. Give me a data center to turn it into resources for the elderly.

Studies show that most people are skeptical about artificial intelligence, and there has been considerable backlash. However, hundreds of millions of people use them. Even people pushing data centers use chatbots.

The purpose of this book is to expand the pushback terms to include this more intimate connection.

Do you really feel like our growing intimacy with artificial intelligence can stop?

Because of all this talk of extinction events and face hugging and my entry into the Australian public service, I'm more hopeful now than I was six months ago. Err, I feel like people will be willing to look at intimate and non-intimate costs.