The Blurred Reality of AI’s ‘Human-Washing’

Voice assistants have go a changeless beingness successful our lives. Maybe you speech to Alexa oregon Gemini oregon Siri to inquire a question oregon to execute a task. Maybe you person to bash a small backmost and distant with a dependable bot whenever you telephone your pharmacy, oregon erstwhile you publication a work assignment astatine your car dealership. You whitethorn adjacent get frustrated and commencement pleading with the robot connected the different extremity of the enactment to link you with a existent human.

That’s the catch, though: These dependable bots are starting to dependable a batch much similar existent humans, with emotions successful their voice, small ticks and giggles successful betwixt phrases, and the occasional flirty aside. Today’s voice-powered chatbots are blurring the lines betwixt what’s existent and what’s not, which prompts a analyzable ethical question: Can you spot a bot that insists it’s really human?

This week, Lauren Goode tells america astir her caller quality communicative connected a bot that was easy tricked into lying and saying it was a human. And WIRED elder writer Paresh Dave tells america however AI watchdogs and authorities regulators are trying to forestall natural-sounding chatbots from misrepresenting themselves.

Show Notes

Read much astir the Bland AI chatbot, which lied and said it was human. Read Will Knight’s communicative astir researchers’ warnings of the manipulative power of emotionally expressive chatbots.

Recommendations

Lauren recommends The Bee Sting by Paul Murray. (Again.) Paresh recommends subscribing to your large section journalism newsletter oregon Substack to enactment informed astir important section issues. Mike recommends Winter Journal, a memoir by Paul Auster.

Paresh Dave tin beryllium recovered connected societal media @peard33. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline astatine @GadgetLab. The amusement is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our taxable euphony is by Solar Keys.

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