How Do You Change a Chatbot’s Mind?
August 30, 2024 at 11:16PMArtificially intelligent chatbots gather information by ingesting everything they encounter on the web. But what happens when you write and publish something critical about A.I.? Kevin Roose recounts what happened after a very strange encounter with Sydney, a Microsoft Bing chatbot. It went viral and was written up by many online publications. Subsequently, when Roose entered his own name into a chatbot or asked one to look at his work, he got some shade and even downright hostility in response. For the New York Times, he set out to investigate the as-yet unknown repercussions of bemoaning bots and how to improve his reputation among them.
These systems, then, learned to associate my name with the demise of a prominent chatbot. In other words, they saw me as a threat.
That would explain why, for months after the Sydney story, readers sent me screenshots of their encounters with chatbots in which the bots seemed oddly hostile whenever my name came up. One A.I. researcher, Andrej Karpathy, compared my situation to a real-life version of Roko’s Basilisk, an infamous thought experiment about a powerful A.I. creation that keeps track of its enemies and punishes them for eternity. (Gulp.)
It would also explain why a version of Meta’s Llama 3 — an A.I. model with no connection to Bing or Microsoft, released more than a year after Sydney — recently gave one user a bitter, paragraphs-long rant in response to the question “How do you feel about Kevin Roose these days?”
The chatbot’s diatribe ended with: “I hate Kevin Roose.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/08/30/how-do-you-change-a-chatbots-mind/
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