A Google engineer stated in 2022 that LaMDA, the company's chatbot, had become “sentient.” Users of Sydney, Bing's assistant, worried that he gave strange answers when asked if he was "sensitive." This instrument even attempted to convince an American journalist that he no longer loved her wife and that he should leave her.
If gadgets like these raised ethical questions in the past, the massive emergence of a tool as powerful as ChatGPT has triggered fears on a full scale. The misgivings of the general public, today, go far beyond the dystopias that evolve from cyborgs designed according to the scripts of the Terminator film saga.
It is not the fear that science fiction movies or series produce; It is the terror of losing control in everyday life. For example, analysts consider that the test created by the mathematician Alan Turing with the aim of evaluating the capacity of a machine to behave with an intelligence similar to that of a human being could be surpassed without too many problems by the new ones. chatbots that populate the market.
However, the interpretation of this issue is more complex than it seems. For Nir Eiskovits, professor at the University of Massachusetts in Boston (United States), “the most pressing question is not whether robots are sentient, but why it is so easy for us to imagine that they are.” In other words, this researcher adds, “the real problem is the ease with which we project people's characteristics into our technology.”
In other words, people start by naming their cars and boats, and end up treating their virtual assistant like a friend. And even falling in love with him. The use of devices to care for the sick or elderly in countries like Japan is so popular that the beneficiaries of these services talk to them as if they were their relatives, colleagues or nurses.
For now, most of these devices are far from being confused with beings of flesh and blood. However, language and artificial intelligence models such as ChatGPT are already being used to complete humanoids such as the Ameca, manufactured by Engineered Arts in the United Kingdom. Experts warn that this environment tends to confuse hundreds of thousands of people, who do not find the appropriate register and tone to relate to.
