How often do you check your phone each day? I bet that you say at least 5-10 times a day. Even if not, you’re still subjected to endless media trends and content. Short-form videos, advertisements, and audio PSAs are constant.
It’s important for platform owners and creators such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and various private entities to create revenue. Technological advancements are an obvious way for companies to test the public and subject them to their latest experiments. Updates and reboots are just the beginning. So, it’s no surprise that we’re currently experiencing an increase in a new form of AI: chatbots.
On Instagram, these chatbots are designed after the likeness of well-known social personalities for you to interact with. Some examples are famed NFL Player Tom Brady and heavily idolized YouTuber Mr. Beast. On Snapchat, a GPT function is personalized to cater to your interests and involve itself in conversations.
These seem harmless. However, what’s the end goal for these corporations? They insist that your information is taken care of and not harvested for any reason. Yet, how much faith do you have in these companies? In your chatbots? Your conversations are data points for the program to use and learn from.
As stated in an article released by METRO on July 27, 2022, the software of an AI program is compared to that of a 7- or 8-year-old child’s knowledge. With that analysis, there is cause for concern regarding chatbots and social interaction. Publicly, Character AI has also become increasingly popular. The app allows you to open several conversations simultaneously.
There are endless options; browsing could take you hours. After picking a character, the chat allows you to click through or redo messages from the character. This may add to bias for the program as it gives users a sense of control over the exchange. Several people have posted on other social platforms and spoken about becoming addicted or hooked to the app. This has increased recently with the application’s new voice chat feature.
There’s a part of your stomach that churns when you hear that it’s all just a phone and you’re talking to code. The other half of your brain is screaming, craving, and begging for lost social interaction. This low-stakes opportunity to converse with someone without judgment, with the underlying awareness that the character is not real, makes it easy for people to create these patterns of escapism. This leads us to the question of what the real purpose of AI is.
Although plenty of studies show how unlikely it is that the world will fall into a dystopian robotic wasteland, it’s still frightening to think about. So why would all these billionaires want to use this technology if not to source information from us? Well, there’s a simple answer: We don’t know.
The future of AI is constantly evolving. Though that may frighten people, drive conspiracies up the wall, and flood the internet with exponentially more useless content, it’s the perfect time to take a step back from the conglomerate media world and ask yourself where you fall on the scale. Do you find yourself chatting with Character AI more than your real, sentient friends? Maybe use that phone to make plans.