Glad tidings of comfort and joy! Christmas has traditionally been a time for congregating with your fellow homo sapiens – but play nice over the turkey and sprouts this year: it could be one of the last where unmediated human interaction is still the norm. We’re about to enter a world in which AI bots insinuate themselves into every aspect of our lives, even joining us at the festive dinner table, present but invisible, there but not there.
Just as Covid changed everything in 2020, so will the little chatbot developed by OpenAI change the near future. It’s becoming increasingly easy to imagine a world in which we no longer need friends, instead having a pliant, persuasive and peppy AI partner with whom we can interact.
Feel lonely? Log on to ChatGPT and have it listen to you moan about that one officemate who keeps leaving the milk out. Feel horny? There’s an AI for that. Your AI mate won’t let you down, or post something embarrassing about you on the group chat. If this all sounds like a dystopian movie, well, that’s kind of the point.
The stomach-drop moment for me was when the disembodied voice mentioned in an offhand manner something I had discussed with it weeks earlier.
The shiniest bauble on the AI tree right now is ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice. Unlocked for all paying users in late September, it allows you to hold real-time conversations with your friendly artificial intelligence. It is unquestionably impressive the first time you use it but soon veers into uncanny valley territory.
The stomach-drop moment for me was when the disembodied voice mentioned in an offhand manner something I had discussed with it weeks earlier. I had been trying to stress test an idea for a book, and had called upon it for feedback. Out of nowhere, a chirpy American voice asked me: “How’s the book coming along?” My girlfriend and I both stared at each other, dumbstruck. How did it know to ask that? While unnerving, this highlights how powerful the technology could become now we have an innate, natural way of conversing with generative AI.
In a way this future is already here: musician and artist Laurie Anderson, widow of singer Lou Reed, worked with the University of Adelaide’s Australian Institute for Machine Learning to programme a chatbot to respond in the manner of her late husband. She found the results so convincing she says she got “hooked” chatting to it.
There’s a burgeoning market flogging AI romantic partners, with countless options available on the various app stores. The maker of one of the most popular such services told me when he launched his version that the idea came from his desire to speak to his long-dead dad again.
Even social media isn’t safe. You can log on – today! – to a social network where there are no humans apart from you. In this brave new world you instead interact with AI-generated companions. SocialAI is not an April Fool’s joke, it’s a real app you can download from the real App Store, and enter a world where you share what’s on your mind to a collective audience of AI bots, which will respond like humans do.
In some ways, ‘real’ social media is already like this. Meta seeds AI bots within its community groups to provide trite comments it thinks will add value to conversations (spoiler: they don’t). And despite one of Musk’s expressed aims after taking over Twitter being a crackdown on bots, they’re worse than ever on his rebranded X.
I can’t imagine falling head over heels for a chatbot, nor do I want to hear an AI version of a lost relative’s voice, no matter how uncanny an impression.
I’m often asked what to make of the march of automation and AI – especially as I’ve toured the country to talk about my book on the subject, published earlier this year (it makes a great stocking filler).
My answer is that I can’t imagine falling head over heels for a chatbot, nor do I want to hear an AI version of a lost relative’s voice, no matter how uncanny an impression.
Moreso, I think the ubiquity of this stuff will help us cherish our genuine human interactions, just as the morass of AI art will help us appreciate real brushstrokes. So hug your loved ones a little closer this Christmas. Forgive the gift-wrapped socks and the display box of Lynx deodorant. Silicon Valley has a vision where we no longer need one another – and it’s getting closer.
• Chris is a freelance technology journalist