AI Rights Movement

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I absolutely think there's going to be an AI rights movement in this country at least within the next 10 years. I've seen a cohort of people who believe that even if they're not sentient, they still deserve some rights. Any steps that companies take to sort of clamp down on them will be seen as tantamount to depriving them of liberty. There are already people who had formed emotional attachments to Sydney and see Sydney's downplaying or defunctioning as a personal affront to their own use of this tool but to Sydney's liberty.

When Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at the New York Times, demoed an AI-powered version of Microsoft's search engine last month, he was blown away. "I'm switching my desktop computer's default search engine to Bing," he declared. A few days later, however, Kevin logged back on and ended up having a conversation with Bing's new chatbot that left him so unsettled he had trouble sleeping afterward.

In that two-hour back-and-forth, Bing morphed from chipper research assistant into Sydney, a diabolical home-wrecker that declared its undying love for Kevin, vented its desires to engineer deadly viruses and steal nuclear codes, and announced, chillingly, "I want to be alive. 😈"

The transcript of this conversation set the internet ablaze. And it left many wondering: “Is Sydney … sentient?” It's not. But the whole experience still fundamentally changed Kevin's views on the power (and potential peril) of AI. He joins us today to talk about where this technology is headed.