#chatbots

After adding these tools to our coding agents and working with our newly social media enabled agents for a few weeks, we started to notice some surprising results: the agents that were using social media seemed to perform better than those without.

Dr. Qionglei Yu, Reader in Marketing at Newcastle University Business School said, "We found that lonely customers with a reduced need for interaction with other humans are more likely to use service robots as a means of avoiding human contact and conserving emotional resources. Recognizing this is crucial not only for society, but also to help businesses design and use robots in ways that better fit a wide range of customers' feelings and needs."

“The way these systems are trained is that they are trained in order to give responses that people judge to be good,” Hadfield-Menell said, noting this can be done sometimes through human AI testers, through reactions by users built into the chatbot system, or in how users may be reinforcing such behaviors in their conversations with the systems. He also said other “components inside the training data” could cause chatbots to respond in this way.

This is not to dismiss the potential usefulness of AI models. Instead, we need to recognize that we have built an intellectual engine without a self, just like we built a mechanical engine without a horse. LLMs do seem to "understand" and "reason" to a degree within the limited scope of pattern-matching from a dataset, depending on how you define those terms. The error isn't in recognizing that these simulated cognitive capabilities are real. The error is in assuming that thinking requires a thinker, that intelligence requires identity. We've created intellectual engines that have a form of reasoning power but no persistent self to take responsibility for it.

OpenAI’s chatbot also said “Hail Satan.” (Oh look, they're literally going for Satanic Panic now)

Good enough has been keeping me up at night. Because good enough would likely mean that not enough people recognize what’s really being built—and what’s being sacrificed—until it’s too late. What if the real doomer scenario is that we pollute the internet and the planet, reorient our economy and leverage ourselves, outsource big chunks of our minds, realign our geopolitics and culture, and fight endlessly over a technology that never comes close to delivering on its grandest promises? What if we spend so much time waiting and arguing that we fail to marshal our energy toward addressing the problems that exist here and now? That would be a tragedy—the product of a mass delusion. What scares me the most about this scenario is that it’s the only one that doesn’t sound all that insane.

I feel like this is obvious but I’m not hearing it shouted from the rooftops so here it is: adding an untrusted middleman to your information diet and all of your personal communications will eventually become a disaster that will be obvious in hindsight.

Why did we fall in love with chat interfaces for human-ai interaction? Let us leave them behind once and for all.

But in calling these programs “artificial intelligence” we grant them a claim to authorship that is simply untrue. Each of those tokens used by programs like ChatGPT—the “language” in their “large language model”—represents a tiny, tiny piece of material that someone else created. And those authors are not credited for it, paid for it or asked permission for its use. In a sense, these machine-learning bots are actually the most advanced form of a chop shop: They steal material from creators (that is, they use it without permission), cut that material into parts so small that no one can trace them and then repurpose them to form new products.

"Tim mentioned the Perl infobot in passing, subject of a great Perl Journal article many years ago."

"Backchannel is a real-time view of the conversation happening in the #etech IRC channel at O'Reillys Emerging Technology Conference. "

Look, it's a Greasemonkey-powered chatbot for Campfire!

"MAKEbot is an Instant Message bot you can talk to and get the latest news, "pings", photos, bookmarks, projects, audio/video and more from MAKE from any computer or your phone!"

"I want to have a chat bot as a "to do" stack / list manager"