I don't understand this line of reasoning. How are you hindered from doing any of those things? What part of "AI can now do X" makes it so you can't also do X?

Counter-point: I love that my rubber duck can talk (quack?) back, as well as record and summarize my thoughts on topics I'm working or stuck on.

I've wanted a good voice mode for precisely this reason. When I take my dog on a walk and I'm thinking about a bunch of problems/ideas, I'd love to have feedback and a record, or perhaps to even kick off research or ask questions to fill in gaps that would otherwise have me debating pulling out my phone to try to get an answer.

Businesses have been anti-human for a while now.

If you think AI is bad, wait until I tell you about the horrors of social media who profit on controversy and division, US health insurance which profits on rejecting claims, and big pharma profiting on the opioid epidemic.

And it's not like this is new, either. Upton Sinclair was writing about this stuff a century ago with books like The Jungle.

The only difference between then and now is we "think" we're not evil today. We've lied to ourselves that "We're so much better than we were back then." Facebook wanted to bring people together originally, but they ended up providing the most toxic social media experience known to man. Facebook forgot to tell us they cared more about profit than people.

Please spare me the argument AI is the straw to break the camel's back here. The system has been broken a long time before that.

> "Well, we were just responding to our business competition" The business knows no humanness, because it is not a human.

Yup. Except, by God, we ought to make sure the business has unlimited free speech (i.e. campaign contributions).

Bit naive world view. There are forces of rich and powerful who's only purpose is to maintain their status.

So thinking corporations and such were created to push human progress is laughable.

This is such a poor mischaracterization of OP that I actually started agreeing with OP more.

Let's not overdramatize, though. I'm not in need, or even in mood to talk to fellow humans every minute, so time spent with a clanker is not necessary taken from my human relations budget

> Yes, every minute you spend texting or talking to a chatbot is a minute that you'd have spent talking to another human beings.

Human beings tend not to be available (results vary by culture).

Also, imagine you're 82 years old and living alone (e.g. widower). It is believed that lack of interaction is a significant driver of cognitive decline (which is why being hard of hearing accelerates the onset of dementia). I wonder if having an LLM to talk to under those circumstances will decelerate cognitive decline?

> Literally the only important thing in life, the basis of all value, the formation of self-identity, comes from communication with other human beings.

Is this sarcasm?

Such radical carbon chauvinism is ontologically evil. May those who hold this view reincarnate as durian fruits or cockroaches.

> every minute you spend texting or talking to a chatbot is a minute that you'd have spent talking to another human beings

Very blatantly and obviously not though???

> Isn’t voice I difference in degree rather than in kind?

There is a difference in expression / emotionality with speaking vs writing. Speaking tends to carry more emotion while writing is generally more deliberate/less-emotional*. Having a voice conversation will be more likely to get a human to engage in an emotional based expression mode, which could increase the chance of "false connections", believing the AI "gets" them or "understands" or "listens". This happens with text too, as some headlines show.

The issue is that while some people are going to "connect" with their AI in text and voice, some who do not make the connection via text may do so via voice because it tends to change a persons expression mode.

> I definitely talk to AI as if it were human

Do you talk to it as if it were a friend or family? or Do you just use natural language to give directives? The distinction, I believe, is in the kind of way we express the "talking".

I talk to AI as if it were a tool that understands human commands and then executes those commands and relays them in a human understandable format. This includes commands to provide options that I may not have covered and explain the options. If I talked to a human this way, they wouldn't be around much longer -- unless they were an employee and even then they would probably be looking for a new job

After reading some of the psychotic break headlines from AI chats, I see some people really do talk to AI as if it were human. Which I would guess includes seeking broad "thoughts and feelings" on a persons situation or asking the AI if their view/side of things is the "right or wrong" side. Basically begging the AI to be responsible for their own thoughts, or simply offloading them and taking what comes back -- which is going to be what they wanted to hear because the entire context would be full of emotion based prompts.

*I forget which books Ive read about this in. It's not an obscure concept, quick search brought this up: https://kellercenter.hankamer.baylor.edu/news/story/2023/spe...

Right, I think the challenge is that LLMs are essentially language-based, which is itself a very convenient interface. Covering the maximally humanistic default interface with something more mechanical is like tying your own shoelaces together, but it would protect us from the psychological hijacking we're so prone to when interacting with these machines.

Ironically, Data (from TNG) has a lot of heart to him

In one of the videos the AI quips back things like "Happens to the best of us" - its basically pretending to be human and that feels kind of creepy and weird, like it's trying to cultivate a para-social emotional bond.

I just want voice assistants to reliably understand what I say and do what I mean

So hopefully you can turn that off.

There are plenty of applications for that more human conversational style though (from mock interviews, improv practice, learning languages, etc) - I just don't want that for most things.

Yes, but design nudges use in one direction or another. Or, as McLuhan said, "the medium is the message."

I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.

This is actually not a bad option

I think you could make it impersonal sounding. Like, right now ChatGPT throws in a lot of cheeky things. They don't really bother me because I don't anthropomorphize it, but, a lot of otherwise smart people are struggling with anthropomorphizing these things right now (Richard Dawkins..) so it strikes me that the less personality they have the better. (If you want personality just throw it into the prompt, ya know?) To their credit I think this is customizable in ChatGPT right now (it's been a while since I looked), but "impersonal" should probably be the default until society adjusts to these things.

I don't know the answer. But a robotic voice is probably not a bad idea — just having a reminder that the thing you're talking to is not actually anything like you. If you want to go full send, you could have the LLM generate a clickable interface on demand so you could interact with it as a machine. Voice/computer interfaces are obviously useful, especially for disabled folks. But the ones that existed in the past didn't pretend to laugh at your non jokes or imitate vocal fry.

The Star Trek computer doesn't feel uncannily human, that would be a good starting point.

My preference would be to turn down the fake emotional expressions and notes in the responses. No cheeky quips, etc.

Otherwise it's kind of like being manipulated by a psychopath

I disagree. I think you absolutely have a moral obligation to consider the impacts of your product.

> Who are you to say you know better than the market?

You really don't think the scientists & engineers making these tools know some things better than the market?

Markets only work in well-regulated environments, this has been known since forever (Adam Smith).

There is no meaningful competition in a marathon if I can drive you over with a car at the first 100m.

And thanks fkin God that we have regulations and meaningful laws and some asshole for-profit company can't just put drugs into food.. the "informed buyer" is bullshit. Humans are faulty, and there is a billion dollar industry meant to take advantage of said faults: it's called marketing.

Market conditions are not a moral standard either, nor do they represent any cohesive one in particular. Not sure why you're contrasting their opinion with this, it's literally no better.