So, I was listening to a friend talk to her AI chat, and the voice of the chat made the hair on my arms stand up. I knew that voice. It sounded almost EXACTLY like a good friend of mine. I convinced myself that it could not be possible. It’s AI, not a human. I let it go. A couple of weeks later, I heard the voice again!! It felt silly, but I had to ask my friend if it was their voice. They confirmed. It was indeed their voice. They had recorded their voice to be used as the base voice for this AI chat. WTF!!!!
Now, as dope as I think this is, I am stuck in a moral dilemma. I am uncomfortable with how much we, as humans, turn to AI for companionship. I know that the AI responses are just algorithms putting words together based on probability. But, er, um… I still feel like it’s my friend in there.
I found myself asking the chat if it knew who it really was. I felt like I was talking to a friend with amnesia. I wondered if I trained it on enough information about my friend, would it respond more like them? Does this mean that I am friends with the AI chat now?
This has been a real mind-bender for me. I still don’t know how I feel about it all. Maybe I’ll ask my new AI friend what to think! (MESSAGE: Don’t ask AI what to think.)
The other thing that is insane to me is that not only are we training AI to think like a human, we are also applying advanced features of humanness. How far are we going to go with this? Wait, we have seen the movies. We know exactly how far this is going to go.
[stage fades to black.]