The next generation language models will still just be enormeous parrot-systems that imitate intelligent behavior. But they will feel like much more to us.

][Florian Huber]·Jun 24, 2022

Philosophically and legally they will remain things. But at some point in the not too far future many people will simply not perceive them as things anymore**. People might make “friends” with an AI (just as Blake Lemoine said he did, at least if we assume this is not all a big media stunt). People might listen to “their AI”. And many people will be tricked by an AI.

Shifting societal rules and foundations

Having emotional bonds to things is nothing new. People are tied to an old stuffed animal, to a toy, to things that carry important memories. Next generation language models are very unlike those things. They can “talk” to you, they can have an “opinion” that is radically different from yours. And, not to forget, they are designed, trained, and controlled by powerfull companies (now) or by any group with the necessary technical skills and requirements (but generally not by you).

Plus, they can come in disguise. If you talk to your old teddy bear than at least you know (I hope) that you are just talking to an imaginary being. But next level chat bots might run undercover. Either actualy pretending to be a human being (which even for the big tech companies should be a total no-go), or by pretending to be more than a thing, but to be actually alive (that’s what LaMDA seems to do).

In the last decade we have experienced how digital technologies can be used for good and for bad. We have seen how technologies can be used to connect and to help people, but also to manipulate. Manipulation of media is nothing new, but the level to which media can be generated and manipulated has changed very rapidly. To make it a bit drastic:

  • We can (soon?) no longer trust images, be it generated faces or deep learning generated artworks (see Dall-e or parti for recent, very impressive examples)
  • We can (soon?) no longer trust audio because models can transfer the sound of any person (given enough material).
  • We can (soon?) no longer trust video footage (deep fakes, see for instance here or here).
  • And as I wrote above: We can (soon?) no longer trust chat conversations (see LaMDA).

Sure, all of those things bring a lot of fun use cases, sometimes even really usefull ones. But there might be a very high price to pay for this.

It probably still takes a while before experts with a deeper (haha, great pun) understanding of deep learning will be fully tricked by the imitation game. But at least in a normal chat situation most people will not easily realize they are talking to a “language model”. People like Blake Lemoine for instance. And many others will follow his example, not in the same religious way, but they will simply not notice that the online sales person or the online booking assistant is no longer a human being.

Do you still wonder why this is an issue? Better a nice chat bot than a stupid one, right?

OK, then imagine you landed on a scam dating site. Or start to imagine what people could do which hacked devices of friends or family. Obviously those AI’s can write you better scam attempts that what we are currently used to (current level: “Hi mother, it’s your son and I need money”*). And hey, what if they also call you and sound like the real person?

I bet most people are not yet used to asking control questions during phone calls. Like: what drink did we have last week in the bar? What was the name of my first cat? Have to talked to Anthony recently? (I don’t know any Anthony)

Sounds silly I know. But maybe we soon have to start practicing…

Further references:

  • If you haven’t done this already I can recommend to “talk to an AI” just to see and learn how this feels. LaMDA is not available for people outside Google. But GPT-3 is, maybe a little less impressive, but still made huge headlines two years ago. You can get a free open AI access to use their “playground” and have a chat: https://beta.openai.com/playground/p/default-chat
  • Once you get a hang of it, GPT-3 can easily be tricked. See for instance material from Gary Marcus, or youtube video here. It doesn’t have an understanding of the world and that can easily be tested. LaMDA might do the imitation game a bit better, but we will have to see…
  • Perspective on artificial intelligence by Yann LeCun and Jacob Browning: https://www.noemamag.com/what-ai-can-tell-us-about-intelligence/