[ryanackley]

What's been productized is a software tool that can carry on a conversation like a human. Sometimes it's informative, funny, and creative. Other times it's ridiculous, mean, stupid, and other bad things. This seems like how people act in real life right?

I'm beginning to think that children should not be using it but adults should be able to decide for themselves.

[toofy]

i think the issue many people have is that people are held responsible for things they say, their reputations take hits, their words can be held against them in a court of law, they can be fired, their peers may never take them seriously again, their wives/husbands may divorce them, etc… because words matter. yet often when someone calls out a model, it’s excused.

words have weight, it’s why we protect them so vociferously. we don’t protect them because they’re useless. we protect them because words matter, a lot.

[ryanackley]

It's excused because it's a piece of software and most people realize that. If you could carry on a conversation with a parrot at the zoo and it told you to kill yourself, would you laugh it off because let's face it, it's just a parrot or indignantly demand the zoo train the parrot better?

A real person has agency. They can see you, get to know you, contemplate your existence as well their own. Empathize with who you are, etc. And we do the same things in return.

This is why when a real person says something mean or hurtful, it matters to us. Or if they threaten us, they have a real body that can cause us harm so we get scared and call the police.

I feel like most people who get indignant about the latest AI rage bait story know all this but feel the need to protect the rest of the world from out of control AI. This is an elitist and patronizing attitude. Let people decide for themselves. As I said, children are a different story. They are impressionable and I can see them misunderstanding how this works.

[bluGill]

We have laws about what you can say in real life. Fire in a crowed theater for example. Even if the things said are not in themselves illegal, if they cause someone to take an illegal action, or attempt to take action but fortunately caught in time - you can be held liable as partially at fault for the illegal action. It might be legal to plan a crime (different countries have different rules, but this is often done at parties where nobody is serious) but if you commit a crime or are serious about committing the crime that is illegal.

How are we going to hold AI liable for their part in causing a crime to be committed? If we cannot prevent AI from causing crime them AI must be illegal.

[ryanackley]

You're assigning a persona to a piece of software that doesn't exist in the material world. It doesn't walk on two legs or drive a car or go to the grocery store or poop.

Everything it says is meaningless unless you assign meaning to it. Yes, I can see children thinking this is a real "being". Adults shouldn't have that excuse.

[bluGill]

Huans assign meaning to things. Ai is mimicing humans.

[jprete]

That's going to be a good standard for a few years, until chatbots are too sophisticated for us to expect average adults to be sufficiently skeptical of their arguments.

[ryanackley]

I see two weaknesses in this argument. First, you're assigning eventual superpower-like intelligence to these AI bots. I see this a lot and I feel like it's rooted in speculation based on pop-culture sci-fi AI tropes.

Second, restricting adult access to "dangerous ideas and information" is a slippery slope. The exercise of speech and press that the British considered to be treasonous preceded the American Revolution.

[bluGill]

I don't care about average - I care about below average adults. (and a lot of us are sometimes below average adults)

[gs17]

A below average adult might not realize A Modest Proposal is satire. Should we ban it so they don't try to eat Irish kids?