a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
am_Unition  ·  671 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: From Bing to Sydney

It's relatively trivial to write a web crawler that can unleash these chatbots onto unwitting humans on social media. Script it to input peoples' postings into the chatbot, and copy+paste the result back to the human. It's been/being done already, I've no doubt, and I'm struggling to think of any non-nefarious uses that don't involve beginning every procedurally-generated reply with "THIS IS A PROCEDURALLY-GENERATED REPLY".

Sometimes it feels like we're in a race to destroy the web, or at least radically alter how we use it. Maybe it's for the best. And I'm officially done with technocrats; disruptions rooted in new tech are generally used to exacerbate wealth inequality and other hot garbage.

Also idk, maybe it's just me, but I cannot even begin to humanize these things. Like I can read the convos and think "wow, that's a pretty clever and interesting robot", but there never will be an emotional engagement that I will feel with a chatbot. Even with a physical form, like M3GAN or whatever. Maybe people are so lonely that they're open to it? I genuinely do not understand.

Oh, and people should always be informed that they are interacting with a non-human, with the full backing of a legal penalty otherwise. So yeah, scripting chatbots, like I mentioned in paragraph 1? Should be illegal.