Casey Newton on ChatGPT gaining voice capabilities:
You can imagine the next steps here. A bot that gets to know your quirks; remembers your life history; offers you coaching or tutoring or therapy; entertains you in whichever way you prefer. A synthetic companion not unlike the real people you encounter during the day, only smarter, more patient, more empathetic, more available.
Those of us who are blessed to have many close friends and family members in our life may look down on tools like this, experiencing what they offer as a cloying simulacrum of the human experience. But I imagine it might feel different for those who are lonely, isolated, or on the margins.
Per Casey’s point, it’s easy to dismiss this as “weird” because interacting with a machine in such a way sounds extremely foreign to almost all of us. It is necessarily that way because it has not really been an option to us before. So perhaps it’s useful to think about it just as our parents thought about the first online interactions with other people via email, newsgroups, chat rooms, etc. That seemed weird too, now it’s completely normal. Obviously there’s a people versus AI element, but given the medium of communication, the really weird thought is: on the output side, what’s the difference? What if those people we were connecting with over the early internet were really just bots? Would we have known? Only because such technology didn’t exist then. But if it had…
All of this feels like an intermediate step to me. To the extent that there is a market of people who want to have voice chats with a synthetic version of MrBeast, the character they want to interact with is MrBeast — not big brother Zach. I haven’t been able to chat with any of these character bots yet, but I struggle to understand how they will have more than passing novelty value.
Yeah, these early celebrity “characters” are clearly gimmicky. Celebrities are some kind of lure to get some people in, I suppose, but the really interesting usage comes from bots that exist as bots, not as faux versions of real people.
More significantly, I think, is the idea that Meta plans to place its AI characters on every major surface of its products. They have Facebook pages and Instagram accounts; you will message them in the same inbox that you message your friends and family. Soon, I imagine they will be making Reels.
And when that happens, feeds that were once defined by the connections they enabled between human beings will have become something else: a partially synthetic social network.
This is much more interesting. You could interact with a bot via chat, but also see what they’re up to via Instagram Stories and what not. A relationship like you have with actual people now.
And when they start interacting with one another, it’s yet another layer. I wrote the following eight and a half years ago:
We’re just now getting used to the first layer of interacting with bots for various services. But having bots chat with other bots is the next logical step that probably isn’t that far off. In many ways, it may be easier to make happen because it removes the flawed human variable in the equation. I’m both kidding and entirely not kidding.
Where this gets weird — okay, even more weird — is when you consider others who are looking at the profile page of the birthday boy/gal. They’ll see you leaving the “happy birthday” wish and they’ll see the “thank you” reply, but they won’t realize that what they’re really watching is a sort of bot kabuki theater performance.
In the movie Her, Theodore’s job involves writing personal letters for other people who can’t muster the effort for whatever reason. This sort of “Uber for cardwriting” model is a quirky way to present a dystopian theme (as well as a theme for the film itself) for a not-too-distant future. But the bot scenario above seems much more realistic. And closer.
Samantha writing the personal letters on your behalf. And then responding to them…
In a sense, all these bots lack would be physical bodies in the meat world. The next step/analogy would be Ex Machina/Westworld — moving the bots into the real world. How far might we be from that? My guess right now would be more than 10 years but is 20 years reasonable?
