Saturday, June 29, 2024

This Viral AI Chatbot Will Lie and Say It’s Human - LAUREN GOODE TOM SIMONITE, Wired

Bland AI’s customer services and sales bot is the latest example of “human-washing” in AI. Experts warn against the consequences of blurred reality. Bland AI formed in 2023 and has been backed by the famed Silicon Valley startup incubator Y Combinator. The company considers itself in “stealth” mode, and its cofounder and chief executive, Isaiah Granet, doesn’t name the company in his LinkedIn profile. The startup’s bot problem is indicative of a larger concern in the fast-growing field of generative AI: Artificially intelligent systems are talking and sounding a lot more like actual humans, and the ethical lines around how transparent these systems are have been blurred. While Bland AI’s bot explicitly claimed to be human in our tests, other popular chatbots sometimes obscure their AI status or simply sound uncannily human. Some researchers worry this opens up end users—the people who actually interact with the product—to potential manipulation.

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