Can an AI ChatBot Make Stuff Up Just to Get Your Business?

[Jim Koepke]

If other humans can "make stuff up" to get your "business", why wouldn't an AI be able to do that?

That made me chuckle. One of my brothers used to work in customer service long before AI. Much of his work was rectifying situations where a salesperson include extra items on a customer's installation order to boost their commissions. Often customers wouldn't notice.

jtk

[Jim Becker]

One of the reasons I made that statement in that way, Jim, is because AI's learn from humans. That's what's different about AIs from "more traditional computing". (now there's an interesting thing to be able to say!) Before AI, computers only did what their human masters told them to do in an explicit way. With AIs, there is certainly basic behavior and (hopefully) rules hard coded, but they suck up information and "learn" from it. Because outside of rote scientific/laws of the universe things, pretty much everything else is generated by human behavior. So back to the premise being discussed here, if humans are "creative" in their efforts to convince other humans to do stuff, it's likely that AIs, who learn from human behavior, will emulate them. This is one of the challenges that's going to need to be addressed by the creators of AI: making sure there are uniform rules about behavior...things like Asimov wrote about in SciFi ages ago!

[Brian Tymchak]

One of the reasons I made that statement in that way, Jim, is because AI's learn from humans. That's what's different about AIs from "more traditional computing". (now there's an interesting thing to be able to say!) Before AI, computers only did what their human masters told them to do in an explicit way. With AIs, there is certainly basic behavior and (hopefully) rules hard coded, but they suck up information and "learn" from it. Because outside of rote scientific/laws of the universe things, pretty much everything else is generated by human behavior. So back to the premise being discussed here, if humans are "creative" in their efforts to convince other humans to do stuff, it's likely that AIs, who learn from human behavior, will emulate them. This is one of the challenges that's going to need to be addressed by the creators of AI: making sure there are uniform rules about behavior...things like Asimov wrote about in SciFi ages ago!

The current AI language models are learning from human produced content, with some models using social media as a source. As we all know humans produce factual and unfactual information, some deliberately unfactual. The old saying "garbage in garbage out" applies at a whole new level with AI. When generative AI becomes main stream, where the AI engines are potentially contributing to the knowledge base at a rate far exceeding the human rate, there is a possibility that the knowledge base becomes heavily polluted with unfactual content before it can be vetted, creating a snowball effect of mis/dis information. I see this as the real danger of AI and guardrails need to be put in place quickly to control.

[Jim Koepke]

One of the reasons I made that statement in that way, Jim, is because AI's learn from humans. That's what's different about AIs from "more traditional computing". (now there's an interesting thing to be able to say!) Before AI, computers only did what their human masters told them to do in an explicit way. With AIs, there is certainly basic behavior and (hopefully) rules hard coded, but they suck up information and "learn" from it. Because outside of rote scientific/laws of the universe things, pretty much everything else is generated by human behavior. So back to the premise being discussed here, if humans are "creative" in their efforts to convince other humans to do stuff, it's likely that AIs, who learn from human behavior, will emulate them. This is one of the challenges that's going to need to be addressed by the creators of AI: making sure there are uniform rules about behavior...things like Asimov wrote about in SciFi ages ago!

Made me think of a few lines often seen in the early computer labs on college campuses:

Oh this darn computer
I wish that I could sell it
It doesn't do what I want it to
Only what I tell it

- Author Unknown

jtk