1y ago

People are speaking with ChatGPT for hours, bringing 2013’s Her closer to reality

arstechnica.com People are speaking with ChatGPT for hours, bringing 2013’s Her closer to reality

Long mobile conversations with the AI assistant using AirPods echo the sci-fi film.

People are speaking with ChatGPT for hours, bringing 2013’s Her closer to reality::Long mobile conversations with the AI assistant using AirPods echo the sci-fi film.

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1y ago

People are speaking with ChatGPT for hours, bringing 2013’s Her closer to reality

arstechnica.com /information-technology/2023/10/people-are-speaking-with-chatgpt-for-hours-bringing-2013s-her-closer-to-reality/

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17 comments

I tried having a conversation with ChatGPT. It's annoyingly predictable. Imagine the most boring, chronically helpful therapist who is always brimming with obvious advice, and that's what you get.
I get that people are lonely, but we're still much closer to ELIZA than Her.
- I think said lonely people would rather chat with a boring therapist than with assholes on the internet who don't even make the slightest attempt to empathize
  
  Ever been to 4chan?
- How does being closer to Eliza than Her make you feel?
- Llama models tuned for conversation are pretty good at it. ChatGPT also was before getting nerfed a million time.
  
  Yeah, I think a lot of people don't realize that they've neutered the shit out of ChatGPT. They don't want it to be vividly humanlike, just mostly so. The main corporate interest in chat AI is profit, i.e. how can they eliminate various repetitive jobs that haven't been automated yet because they require someone with pseudo-humanlike behavior. Examples would include stuff like help desks, customer services, knowledge managers, certain types of assistants, legal aids, etc. That's their end game.
  Remember, many of these companies diving into this field are very wary of their tech coming off as too realistic. Some of us may be excited at the prospect of AGI becoming a reality, but I would bet the majority of society (and likely many governments) would instantly turn on such tech. Even though LLMs are far, far, faaaar away from achieving AGI, the fact that they already freak many folks out with their current limitations proves my point.
  Anyway, sorry for the rant. TLDR, OpenAI intentionally keeps ChatGPT's conversational abilities relatively simple/efficient since they're focused more on it seeming human enough to get the job(s) done.
- What you described is quite a bit better than what some people get from their lives. Sad but true.

Except it’s not hot
- Yet.
- There are other bots for that...

Its basically a parrot with no long term memory. The fact that there are people out there that talk to it for hours does not surpise me. Its just sad. Because people do that because they dont have anyone. Theyre alone and theyd be happy to talk to anyone and anything if they could.

At one point, I thought I'd turned it off, and I saw a pelican, and I said to my dog, 'Oh, wow, a pelican!' And my AirPod went, 'A pelican, huh? That's so exciting for you! What's it doing?'
I’m sorry but how does this impress anyone? It’s like a conversation with autocorrect.

This is the best summary I could come up with:
In 2013, Spike Jonze's Her imagined a world where humans form deep emotional connections with AI, challenging perceptions of love and loneliness.
Ten years later, thanks to ChatGPT's recently added voice features, people are playing out a small slice of Her in reality, having hours-long discussions with the AI assistant on the go.
Last week, we related a story in which AI researcher Simon Willison spent hours talking to ChatGPT.
Speaking things out with other people has long been recognized as a helpful way to re-frame ideas in your mind, and ChatGPT can serve a similar role when other humans aren't around.
On Sunday, an X user named "stoop kid" posted advice for having a creative development session with ChatGPT on the go.
After prompting about helping with world-building and plotlines, he wrote, "turn on speaking mode, put in headphones, and go for a walk."
The original article contains 559 words, the summary contains 145 words. Saved 74%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Wait, people are using a voice-chatbot to voice-chat with? Interesting....

Article photo taken 20 minutes after the following prompt:
"ChatGPT, please tell me how amazing my moustache is. Take as long as you need."

This type of article is hilarious to me because chat bots have existed for over a decade already, but AI is the current buzzword so here’s more garbage “journalism” about it, whee
- To be fair, chat bots previoulsy were not anywhere near as complex as they are now. This, imo, would warrent further discussion because of how significantly more advanced they are.

17 comments