[Fraterkes]

Hey! Bit of an unusual question maybe: if this stuff further exarcerbates the loneliness epidemic and atomization of society, will you be able to live with yourself you think? If you hear about teenagers only spending time with your chatbot in 5 years, will you feel some amount of personal responsibility or not? Always curious to hear you guys' perspective on that kind of stuff!

[WarmWash]

That's not really a fair question, especially given the audience here on HN. Most here have blood on their hands from the previous 25 years of tech-eats-the-world.

[FridgeSeal]

Well this is a new brand of whataboutism I haven’t seen before!

Did something bad? Better ablate yourself of the responsibility of holding people to account for making it _worse_! Acting this way just makes it seem more like you regret the blood on your hands because it has dirtied your shirt, and not because you’ve done something actually bad, otherwise you’d have at least some degree of guilt and reticence to see things get worse.

[overfeed]

> if this stuff further exarcerbates the loneliness epidemic and atomization of society, will you be able to live with yourself you think?

Looking at the 30,000-foot view of how society is set up: laws, economic system, employee incentives, etc, do you suppose it matters what the individual contributors think? I say this not to absolve anyone of responsibility, but to point out the obvious outcomes of our incentives across the strata (polity -> shareholders -> boards -> C-suite -> employees)

I will bet you dollars to donuts, somewhere inside OpenAI is a frequently-used revenue dashboard, but not for loneliness - if anything, OpenAI will make horny models and tout itself as a solution to loneliness, a la character.ai - if that earns them more money.

[password54321]

Technology is what you make of it. If you want to make it your best friend and your only friend, that's your choice. But I would guess more people would use it as a personal tutor. If it works as well as the demo, this already crushes most language learning apps. Actually the only apps for learning language that it would fail to replace would still be Tandem and HelloTalk because it still can't replicate the nuance of real human interaction.

[overgard]

"Blame the individual" doesn't really make sense when we're talking about things that have a society-wide impact. As an analogue, personally I'm not on social media, but I am affected by social media because everyone around me is on social media and their happiness and wellbeing also impacts me. AI companies need to stop pretending they can just outsource responsibility for their products.

I think assuming people will use it as a tutor/learning tool is.. way too optimistic. A small fraction will, but the majority will just view things like a second language as something not worth learning.

[derangedHorse]

So you want to blame a company for the impact others have on you because those said others choose to consume their product?

[overgard]

Go read "Careless People". The social media people knew exactly how damaging their product was early on, as evidenced by the fact that they wouldn't even let their own children use it. I think AI people understand how damaging their product is too; and so I will never respect them unless they take responsibility for the things they create. Going "not my problem bruh, I got my bag!" is a bad ethical position.

[Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe]

> choose

I think there's a logic leap here that ignores most of what big companies know about how to gey people addicted to things

[liquicity]

Was this directed at the voice technology in the article, or at AI in general - as they are two very different conversations?

If you're talking about ChatGPT in general (as I guess you are) I think the Jury's still out on whether this will have a net positive or negative on society.

Right now, it's leaning towards negative, but there are optimistic futures to be had at the same time.

As someone who likes to think that they would turn down a lot of tech jobs due to moral dilemmas - for me, currently working on AI wouldn't be one.

For me at-least it's a tool to learn quicker, and reduce friction on projects I otherwise may not have dived into. As with all new technology, we're still in this grace period / lack the bigger picture we now have on other, now known to be destructive technologies.

[derangedHorse]

I would say no if the question was asked of me. It’s like asking if you’d feel bad about marriage if you ended up divorced with a child. Or if you’d feel bad about commenting if it made someone feel like they lost brain cells.

The morality of an action isn’t based on actual consequences because the future isn’t known in advanced. All we can do is act on the perceived consequences of our actions, and if we think those are good, pursue them.

[jjulius]

You don't go into a marriage assuming you'll get divorced. You assume you won't, hope for the best, work not to, and then it happens. You work through those problems with the child so that it hopefully doesn't impact them as much as it otherwise could.

The loneliness epidemic is driven by companies maximizing keeping their customers engaged with their screens, something OpenAI is wont to do. Knowing that the company wants customers engaged and that this will do that, and also knowing that that plays into the loneliness epidemic by substituting human interaction, makes it far different than getting married and then maybe or maybe not getting divorced.

[famouswaffles]

People who do this kind of stuff are very irritating. You clearly have some problem with the work they do. Instead of saying and approaching that outright, you pass it in some passive aggressive fake bullshit. Makes you sound like the kind of person I would much rather not be speaking to, which is kind of ironic given your comment.

[knuppar]

i mean you chose to be irritated by it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[munchler]

I love the chatty tone of this utterly dystopian question.

[overgard]

I don't think the question is really the dystopian part

[z7]

"Hey Leibniz, how do you live with yourself knowing that your binary system helped eventually replace human conversations?"

[vinaigrette]

Fair question, although I think he really has a hard time living with it ...

[dag100]

Oh no, now I'd better blame Hitler and Stalin's ancestors for their misdeeds. Of course, the SS soldier bears no responsibility, however, as he was just doing his job.

[dansquizsoft]

So many wet blankets on this post today with these types of questions...

[overgard]

Its weird how years of relentless doom trolling and threatening peoples livelihoods, mixed with absolutely real, measurable, AWFUL societal impacts have soured people!