"We must stop giving AI human traits. My first interaction with GPT-3 rather seriously annoyed me. It pretended to be a person. It said it had feelings, ambitions, even consciousness.

That’s no longer the default behaviour, thankfully. But the style of interaction — the eerily natural flow of conversation — remains intact. And that, too, is convincing. Too convincing.

We need to de-anthropomorphise AI. Now. Strip it of its human mask. This should be easy. Companies could remove all reference to emotion, judgement or cognitive processing on the part of the AI. In particular, it should respond factually without ever saying “I”, or “I feel that”… or “I am curious”.

Will it happen? I doubt it. It reminds me of another warning we’ve ignored for over 20 years: “We need to cut CO₂ emissions.” Look where that got us. But we must warn big tech companies of the dangers associated with the humanisation of AIs. They are unlikely to play ball, but they should, especially if they are serious about developing more ethical AIs.

For now, this is what I do (because I too often get this eerie feeling that I am talking to a synthetic human when using ChatGPT or Claude): I instruct my AI not to address me by name. I ask it to call itself AI, to speak in the third person, and to avoid emotional or cognitive terms.

If I am using voice chat, I ask the AI to use a flat prosody and speak a bit like a robot. It is actually quite fun and keeps us both in our comfort zone."

https://theconversation.com/we-need-to-stop-pretending-ai-is-intelligent-heres-how-254090?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-gb

Here’s how people are actually using AI

Analyzed a million ChatGPT interaction logs and found the second most popular use of AI was sexual role-playing. Aside from that, the overwhelmingly most popular use case for the chatbot was creative composition. People also liked to use it for brainstorming and planning, asking for explanations and general information

#ArtificialIntelligence #AI #LLM #GenAI #chatbot #sex #misinformation #anthropomorphization #technology #tech

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/08/12/1096202/how-people-actually-using-ai/

OpenAI itself warning that GPT-4o’s capabilities seem to be causing some users to become increasingly attached to the chatbot, with potentially worrying consequences.

“anthropomorphization and emotional reliance,” which “involves attributing human-like behaviors and characteristics to nonhuman entities, such as AI models.”

#OpenAI #ChatGPT #chatbot #GenAI #LLM #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #anthropomorphization #psychology #technology #tech

https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/openai-is-worried-that-chatgpt-4o-users-are-developing-feelings-for-the-chatbot

In this house we anthropomorphize inanimate objects. Our Peugot 107 is named Adora Belle Dearheart from Terry Pratchett. Our washing machine is named James like Jesse and James from Team Rocket because it sounds like he's going to take off and between the two of the gay Millenial icons seemed the more likely to take a load.

Now I have a bike. She weighs 17kg. She's a big girl. I felt that she was a Pam. Seemed like a good name for a apple-bottomed, southern girl in a sundress with a pollyanna mentality that would be down for a good ride in the country. Say hi to Pam. I ride her 5 km to work everyday.

#bike #anthropomorphization #life

It's not a Computer, it's a companion!

by Justine Moore, Bryan Kim, Yoki Li & Martin Casado

“The great thing about AI is that it is constantly evolving. One day it will be better than a real (girlfriend). One day, the real one will be the inferior choice.”

(Andreessen Horowitz a16z website)

#AI #AIGirlfriends #Replika #Andreessen #Horowitz #sexism #anthropomorphization #a16z

https://adiowrites.wordpress.com/2023/07/31/of-ai-girlfriends-heady-cocktail-of-fallacies-and-ethical-quandaries/

#HvFoerster on the origins of #computational_neuroscience

For reasons that still baffle me, it was the pragmatic American engineers and scientists, not the romantic Europeans, who began to toss anthropomorphic sand into the gear box of evolving notions and ideas. To name two such cases, the computer people began to talk about a machine’s storage system as if it were a computer’s #memory, and the communication engineers began to talk about signals as if they were #information.

Perhaps these were the precursors for the second derailment which, ironically, was the inverse of the first. lt worked as follows. The first phase was #anthropomorphization: mental functions projected into machines. However, we knew how these machines worked because we built them and wrote the programs. Consequently, an appropriate “#mechanomorphization,” the concepts dealing with computer hard- and software were projected back into the workings of the brain and, presto!, we knew how the #mind worked.

Heinz Von Foerster
*To know and to let know - an applied theory of knowledge
Canadian Library Journal, Vol. 39, No. 5, October l982.*

For me the silver lining of Twitter's destruction is stuff like this.

#twitter #tumblr #socialmedia #anthropomorphization #eroticart #queerart #queer #queerwomen #lesbian #gay

https://www.tumblr.com/clottedscream/700768958168580096/pins-you-against-a-wall-you-thought-you-could