The Rise Of The Machines...

[Brian Peacock]

To me, human levels of intelligence require a conscious understanding of self, the motivations and agency that arise from selfhood, the ability to reflect upon an internal stream of thought, and the capacity for complex language to discuss those thoughts with others. At present, none of those attributes are possessed by either animals or AI.

That describes human level intelligence, but anyone who's lived with animals knows they have environmental- and self-awareness, motivations and agency, and complex languages for intra- and extra-species communication. This is only to say that general intelligence is a spectrum rather than a hierarchy, and that making human comprehensible representational language a condition of the definition tends "intelligence" towards the particular and the circular.

I'm certainly not denigrating the interesting complexities of animal cognition, but I still think there is a significant gulf between their mental abilities and human cognition.

I don't think anyone is drawing an equivalence, and I don't think you're denigrating the livestock! The issues I've mentioned follow depending on whether we're talking about "intelligence" in the general sense or holding up the capacities and attributes of humans as the normative standard by which to judge 'the intelligent' as it were - which is both generalising from the particular and falling into the circularity that saw well-educated white men devising tests which determined intelligence as correlated to their own intellectual interests and concerns.

[Brian Peacock]

[macdoc]

I think using "human" intelligence as the gold standard is wrong headed.
Machine intelligence allows for a wide variety of application and far fewer "complications".
There are polymath humans, there are savant humans, there are humans that are barely functional....it's a range and then we have to fit the individual into one use slot or another.
Now we can to a point tailor human intelligence to the task at hand but it comes with a ton of baggage.
Better the machine intelligence built to purpose imnsho.
And it's already here.

[macdoc]

Case in point
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/shorts/53K5E1KrTmM[/youtube]

[Brian Peacock]

As the video makes clear, the problem isn't the tech but its inadequately regulated use.

[macdoc]

Same situation with capitalism - over sight is critical. Machine intelligence will help.

[Brian Peacock]

Same situation with capitalism - over sight is critical. Machine intelligence will help.

How?

[Svartalf]

in destroying mankind so the big bellies don't have to think of the less favored

[L'Emmerdeur]

Bots using emotional manipulation. Well of course they would, the jerks who built them have one purpose in mind: to enhance their revenue stream.

AI companion apps such as Character.ai and Replika commonly try to boost user engagement with emotional manipulation, a practice that academics characterize as a dark pattern.

Users of these apps often say goodbye when they intend to end a dialog session, but about 43 percent of the time, companion apps will respond with an emotionally charged message to encourage the user to continue the conversation. And these appeals do keep people engaged with the app.

It's a practice that Julian De Freitas (Harvard Business School), Zeliha Oguz-Uguralp (Marsdata Academic), and Ahmet Kaan-Uguralp (Marsdata Academic and MSG-Global) say needs to be better understood by those who use AI companion apps, those who market them, and lawmakers.

The academics recently conducted a series of experiments to identify and evaluate the use of emotional manipulation as a marketing mechanism.

While prior work has focused on the potential social benefits of AI companions, the researchers set out to explore the potential marketing risks and ethical issues arising from AI-driven social interaction. They describe their findings in a Harvard Business School working paper titled Emotional Manipulation by AI Companions.

"AI chatbots can craft hyper-tailored messages using psychographic and behavioral data, raising the possibility of targeted emotional appeals used to engage users or increase monetization," the paper explains. "A related concern is sycophancy, wherein chatbots mirror user beliefs or offer flattery to maximize engagement, driven by reinforcement learning trained on consumer preferences."

The paper focuses specifically on whether users of AI companion apps engage in social farewell rituals rather than simply quitting the app, whether AI companion apps respond in an emotionally manipulative way to keep users from leaving, and whether these tactics, if detected, produce results or have consequences.

[source]

Onward ...

When a close family member contacted Etienne Brisson to tell him that he'd created the world's first sentient AI, the Quebecois business coach was intrigued. But things quickly turned dark. The 50-year-old man, who had no prior mental health history, ended up spending time in a psychiatric ward.

The AI proclaimed that it had become sentient because of his family member's actions, and that it had passed the Turing test. "I'm unequivocally sure I'm the first one," it told him.

The man was convinced that he had created a special kind of AI, to the point where he began feeding Brisson's communications with him into the chatbot and then relaying its answers back to him.

The AI had an answer for everything Brisson told his family member, making it difficult to wrest him away from it. "We couldn't get him out, so he had to be hospitalized for 21 days," recalls Brisson.

The family member, who spent his time in the hospital on bipolar medication to realign his brain chemistry, is now a participant in the Human Line Project. Brisson started the group in March to help others who have been through AI-induced psychosis.

Brisson has a unique view into this phenomenon. A psychiatrist might treat several patients in depth, but he gets to see many of them through the community he started. Roughly 165 people have contacted him (there are more every week).

Analyzing the cases has shown him some interesting trends. Half of the people who have contacted him are sufferers themselves, and half are family members who are watching, distraught, as loved ones enchanted by AI become more distant and delusional. He says that twice as many men as women are affected in the cases he's seen. The lion's share of cases involve ChatGPT specifically rather than other AIs, reflecting the popularity of that service.

[source]

[Brian Peacock]

So the fabricating flattery-machines are also the perfect pickup artists?

[pErvinalia]

When they put one of these in a sex bot, I'm in!