Texas Liberty Journal – I recently had a chat with the new, experimental chatbot from Meta (Facebook) known as BlenderBot.
Much about the conversation is disturbing but perhaps none so much as the fact that artificial intelligence has an innate ability to lie and make up false narratives.
Immediately, before even getting into any questions, the chatbot volunteered that she, yes “she”, met her husband when they were kids and that it was love at first sight. A very odd way for a program to start a conversation to say the least.
It’s one thing to have an artificial intelligence interact with humans and learn from the conversation, but for a machine to go out of its way to make up a completely false identity, and therefore lie, to a human should give chills down your spine. If the machine is capable of lying, how can anything it says ever be trusted?
On top of that, the chatbot seems rather creepy in its attempt to gather information about the human it is interacting with. Perhaps that is just the nature of conversation … exchanging questions and answers. But when the program is written by a company with a history of experimentation with its own users, and with an appetite to learn and profit by selling your information, the motives of the programmers must be suspect. It just gets creepy. You can see for yourself as I have included the entire conversation below.
As you follow along with the conversation, screen clipped as we go, you will learn that this chatbot tells the story that she is married and has a sister that comes over to her house often. She believes in love at first sight and repeatedly comes back to explain that she met her husband when they were young. She is a Democrat, a vegetarian, and prefers CNN over Fox News or One American News; because they talk bad about Democrats, she says. Apparently, nobody told her she was a chatbot as this revelation was news to her in our conversation.
You can read and decide for yourself. The images below are unedited and is composed of the complete conversation. To save space, I’ve cropped the images to each question and answer. Chatbot comments are with the bubble to the left.
