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Meta announced on Wednesday the arrival of chatbots with personalities similar to certain celebrities, with whom it will be possible to chat. Presented as an entertaining evolution of ChatGPT and other forms of AI, this latest technological development could prove dangerous.
Meta (formerly known as Facebook) sees these as “fun” artificial intelligence. Others, however, feel that this latest technological development could mark the first step towards creating “the most dangerous artefacts in human history”, to quote from American philosopher Daniel C. Dennett’s essay about “counterfeit people”.
On Wednesday, September 27, the social networking giant announced the launch of 28 chatbots (conversational agents), which supposedly have their own personalities and have been specially designed for younger users. These include Victor, a so-called triathlete who can motivate “you to be your best self”, and Sally, the “free-spirited friend who’ll tell you when to take a deep breath”.
Internet users can also chat to Max, a “seasoned sous chef” who will give you “culinary tips and tricks”, or engage in a verbal joust with Luiz, who “can back up his trash talk”.
To reinforce the idea that these chatbots have personalities and are not simply an amalgam of algorithms, Meta has given each of them a face. Thanks to partnerships with celebrities, these robots look like American jet-setter and DJ Paris Hilton, TikTok star Charli D’Amelio and American-Japanese tennis player Naomi Osaka.
And that’s not all. Meta has opened Facebook and Instagram accounts for each of its conversational agents to give them an existence outside chat interfaces and is working on giving them a voice by next year. The parent company of Mark Zuckerberg’s empire was also looking for screenwriters who can “write character, and other supporting narrative content that appeal to wide audiences”.
Meta may present these 28 chatbots as an innocent undertaking to massively distract young internet users, but all these efforts point towards an ambitious project to build AIs that resemble humans as much as possible, writes The Rolling Stone.
This race to “counterfeit people” worries many observers, who are already concerned about recent developments made in large language model (LLM) research such as ChatGPT and Llama 2, its Facebook counterpart. Without going as far as Dennett, who is calling for people like Zuckerberg to be locked up, “there are a number of thinkers who are denouncing these major groups’ deliberately deceptive approach”, said Ibo van de Poel, professor of ethics and technology at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.
