Especially when you consider the bottom line that this tech will be ultimately be horned into advertising somehow (read: the field dedicated to manipulating you into buying shit).
This whole fucking thing bothers me.
When one gets to be a certain age one begins to become attuned to this tendency of others' emotions to manipulate you, so you take steps to not let that happen. You're not ignoring their emotions, but you can address the underlying issue more effectively if you're not emotionally charged. It's a useful skill that more people would benefit from learning earlier in life. Perhaps AI will accelerate that particular skill development, which would be a net benefit to society.
Most manipulators end up getting bored of trying again and again with the same person. That won't happen if you are a dealing with a machine, as it can change names, techniques, contexts, tones, etc. until you give it what its operator wants.
Maybe you're part of the X% who will never give in to a machine. But keep in mind that most people have no critical thinking skills nor mental fortitude.
This is incredibly optimistic, which I love, but my own experience with my utterly deranged elder family, made insane by TV, contradicts this. Every day they're furious about some new things fox news has decided it's time to be angry about: white people being replaced (thanks for introducing them to that, tucker!), "stolen" elections, Mexicans, Muslims, the gays, teaching kids about slavery, the trans, you name it.
I know nobody else in my life more emotionally manipulated on a day to day basis than them. I imagine I can't be alone in watching this happen to my family.
That happens with a lot of tech. Social networks are used to con people more than to educate people about con men.
Great replacement and white genocide are white nationalist far-right conspiracy theories. If you believe this is happening, you are the intellectual equivalent of a flat-earther. Should we pay attention to flat-earthers? Are their opinions on astronomy, rocketry, climate, and other sciences worth anyone's time? Should we give them a platform?
> In the words of scholar Andrew Fergus Wilson, whereas the islamophobic Great Replacement theory can be distinguished from the parallel antisemitic white genocide conspiracy theory, "they share the same terms of reference and both are ideologically aligned with the so-called '14 words' of David Lane ["We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children"]." In 2021, the Anti-Defamation League wrote that "since many white supremacists, particularly those in the United States, blame Jews for non-white immigration to the U.S.", the Great Replacement theory has been increasingly associated with antisemitism and conflated with the white genocide conspiracy theory. Scholar Kathleen Belew has argued that the Great Replacement theory "allows an opportunism in selecting enemies", but "also follows the central motivating logic, which is to protect the thing on the inside [i.e. the preservation and birth rate of the white race], regardless of the enemy on the outside."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Replacement
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_genocide_conspiracy_theo...
> wanting border laws to be enforced
Border laws are enforced.
> and not wanting your children to be groomed into cutting off their body parts.
This doesn't happen. In fact, the only form of gender-affirming surgery that any doctor will perform on under-18 year olds is male gender affirming surgery on overweight boys to remove their manboobs.
> You are definitely sane and your entire family is definitely insane.
You sound brave, why don't you tell us what your username means :) You're one to stand by your values, after all, aren't you?
Why did you pick that username?
So which group is your country being replaced by? Muslims or Chinese?
Why did you choose that username?
In 100 years you will be gone and your 'place' on Earth taken by someone else. Instead of caring whether they are good people, kind, considerate, in good health, with access to education and human rights and a functioning environment with drinkable water and hope for the future - and haven't been left the wreckage of a ruined planet unable to support life - instead frothing at the mouth at a fantasy that they have brown skin or speak Arabic or came directly from Africa instead of from Africa-via-Europe or that they don't properly respect the Pope, or don't have names like Matthew Mark Luke and John, is not sane.
> "not wanting your children to be groomed into cutting off their body parts"
Christians and Jews have been doing routine cutting off children's body parts by the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, every year for lifetimes in the USA. Trans people haven't.
Fox is surely not trying to distract anyone from this, are they? https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/10/23/1806673/-Republi... (Part 1 of 31)
Tools and the weaponization of them.
This can be said of pretty much any tech tool that has the ability to touch a good portion of the population, including programming languages themselves, CRISPR?
I agree we have to be careful of the bad, but the downsides in this case are not so dangerous that we should be trying to suppress it because the benefits can be incredible too.
Start telling Grandma never to answer the phone.
Obviously one needs to be aware of the downsides of tech and the downsides of large corporate manipulation, but if you had no awareness of the outside world and could only infer it from these sort of comments, you'd assume we were all living terrible lives.
That wasn't even my impression.
My impression was that it reminds me of the humans that I dislike.
It speaks in customer service voice. That faux friendly tone people use when they're trying to sell you something.
Mmmmm while I get that, in the context w/ the grandparent comment, having a human wouldn't be better then? It's effectively the same. Because, realistically that's a pretty common voice/tone to get even in tech support.
There are different kinds of humans.
Some of them are your friends, and they're willing to take risks for you and they take your side even when it costs them something.
Some of them are your adversaries, overtly. They do not hide it.
Some of them pretend to be your friends, even though they're not. And that's what they modeled it on. For some reason.
The problem is you don't like the customer service/sales voice because they "pretend to be your friends".
Let me know if I didn't capture it.
I don't think people "pretend to be my friend" when they answer the phone to help me sort out of airline ticket problem. I do believe they're trained to and work to take on a "friendly" tone. Even if the motive isn't genuine, because it's trained, it's way a nicer of an experience than someone who's angry or even simply monotone. Trying to fix my $1200 plane ticket is stressful enough. Don't need the CSR to make it worse.
Of course I agree that "angry" is in most cases not appropriate, but still, I can see cases in which it might, for example, if the caller is really aggressive, curses, or blames unreasonably the agent, the agent could become angry. Training people that everybody will answer them "friendly" no matter their behavior does not sound good for me.
Really? I found this demo painful to watch and literally felt that "cringe" feeling. I showed it to my partner and she couldn't even stand to hear more than a sentence of the conversation before walking away.
It felt both staged and still frustrating to listen to.
And, like far too much in AI right now, a demo that will likely not pan out in practice.
This is partly right.
Agree. Can't wait to see how it'll be...
Is that because you're not used to it? Honestly asking.
This is probably the first time it feels natural where as all our previous experiences make "chat bots" and "automated phone systems", "automated assistants" absolutely terrible.
Naturally, we dislike it because "it's not human". But this is true of pretty much any thing that approaches "uncanny valley". But, if the "it's not human" solves your answer 100% better/faster than the human counter part, we tend to accept it a lot faster.
This is the first real contender. Siri was the "glimpse" and ChatGPT is probably the reality.