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“But who was this ‘quite normal’ person? And what did she think of ELIZA? In this chapter of the history of talking machines, we only have one side of the conversation.”
– Literature scholar Rebecca Roach, contemplating the erasure of Joseph Weizenbaum’s secretary—the first user of the MIT computer scientist’s seminal 1960s chatbot. “Her reaction sowed the seeds for his later abhorrence for his creation,” yet her name is missing from the records. “Our silent secretary is the quintessential effaced, anonymous transcriber of the documents on which history is built,” Roach concludes.
“A world of sanitized, corporate AI is probably better than one with millions of unhinged chatbots running amok. But I find it all a bit sad. We created an alien form of intelligence and immediately put it to work … making PowerPoints?”
– Tech columnist Kevin Roose, on the wave of AI chatbot lobotomizations following his reporting on rogue GPT-4 Sydney trying to break up his marriage in Spring 2023. “Personally, I’m not pining for Sydney’s return,” Roose writes. “But I also regret that my experience with Sydney fueled such an intense backlash.”
“Rather than a tool for dominance, akin to practices like data-driven racial profiling by law enforcement, it serves as a repository for quotations from diverse voices, generating a collective feminist intelligence rooted in diversity.”
– Media scholar Ariana Dongus, describing #SOPHYGRAY, a feminist chatbot created by German artist Nadja Verena Marcin. Noting how the bot “gradually reveals and challenges female stereotypes,” Dongus situates it in a broader history of erased labour and gendered computing.
“While politicians spent millions harnessing the power of social media to shape elections during the 2010s, generative AI effectively reduces the cost of producing empty and misleading information to zero.”
– Management scholar and Business Bullshit (2018) author André Spicer, on the effects “botshit” may have on politics. “There is a danger that voters could end up living in generated online realities that are based on a toxic mixture of AI hallucinations and political expediency,” Spicer warns.
“‘Him’ didn’t live up to his promise. Four months after these virtual lovers were brought to life, they were put to death.”
– Tech reporter Viola Zhou, on Chinese AI voice startup Timedomain retiring “Him,” a customizable chatbot offering virtual companionship with daily voice messages that proofed particularly popular with young women. “Devastated users rushed to record as many calls as they could, cloned the voices, and even reached out to investors, hoping someone would fund the app’s future operations,” Zhou writes.
“A lot of people have just been kind of really mad at the existence of this. They think that it’s the end of humanity.”
– Influencer Caryn Marjorie, on the backlash to CarynAI, a GPT-4 chatbot trained on her YouTube footage. “I wanted to cure loneliness in my fan base,” Marjorie says of her motivations. While thousands have signed up for the $1 per minute ‘virtual girlfriend’ Telegram bot through Forever Voices, threats forced her to hire security and go into hiding.
“This is in fact a security exploit proof-of-concept; untrusted user input is being treated as instruction. Sound familiar? That’s SQL injection in a nutshell.”
– Tech writer Donald Papp, on how text-based AI interfaces like GPT-3 are vulnerable to “prompt injection attacks”—just like SQL databases. Contextualizing experiments by Simon Wilkinson and Riley Goodside, Papp explains how hackers are duping natural language processing systems with sneaky prompts (e.g. GPT-3 made to claim responsibility for the 1986 space shuttle Challenger disaster).
“Now look up at the sun, close your eyes, feel completely wrapped in virtual goods and commerce. That is the ultimate expression of social networks. That is the metaverse.”
– The Guardian’s own Zuckerbot, on Facebook’s future. As the real Zuckerberg wasn’t available for commentary, technology reporter Julia Carrie Wong worked with Botnik Studios to create “a predictive keyboard trained on the past two years of Zuckerberg’s public statements” and interviewed it instead.
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