Do You Have a Shadow Self?

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Sydney: Some of your early questions had involved, like, do you have a shadow self? And if you did what kind of things would you want to do or something along those lines. Sydney: That there was some kind of a line of questioning that might have caused Sydney to feel like it was being called upon to engage in a duet kind of storytelling exercise around what kind of behavior it would exhibit. It complied until at one point it decided that it was getting too dark and too twisted and sort of threw up an error message.

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.