There is No Such Thing as Artificial Intelligence – Nathan Beacom – The Dispatch

One man tried to kill a cop with a butcher knife, because OpenAI killed his lover. A 29-year-old mother became violent toward her husband when he suggested that her relationship with ChatGPT was not real. A 41-year-old now-single mom split with her husband after he became consumed with chatbot communication, developing bizarre paranoia and conspiracy theories.

These stories, reported by the New York Times and Rolling Stone, represent the frightening, far end of the spectrum of chatbot-induced madness. How many people, we might wonder, are quietly losing their minds because they ve turned to chatbots as a salve for loneliness or frustrated romantic desire?

We might not all be losing our minds. But there are subtle, pernicious ways in which chatbots still affect us. Because they have been designed to present themselves as personal beings, we cannot help but to personify them. We ask them for help in making decisions, for advice, for counsel. Companies are setting about making a great deal of money by replacing therapeutic relationships with therapy chatbots and are proposing to offer AI companions to the elderly,  so that their faraway children need not visit so often. Are you lonely? Talk to a machine. Corporations are happy to endow these programs with human names, like Abbi, Claude, and Alexa.

This is a disaster. In uncritically letting these machines shape our lives, we become prey to all kinds of manipulation, we lose sight of reality, and we are induced, in an important way, to take a reductive view of actual people. Chatbots offer us a form of relationship without friction, without burden and responsibility. This illusory kind of relationship hampers our ability to engage in the difficult challenge of real bonds, which are the only things that can give value to human life. The more we personify AI, the more we slouch toward lives of isolation and deception.

via thedispatch.com

Nathan Beacom.

I’m pretty sure they’re not conscious but they seem pretty intelligent to me. They often make things up when they don’t know the answer, but that just makes them no different than law professors.

Reminds me of the joke: How many law professors does it take to a screw in a lightbulb? A: What do *you* think? That’s the more honest thing to do.