Chatbots in Teaching

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I think the place that I have found the most benefit from these chatbots so far is actually in teaching. So for example, I've asked chatbot to help me understand complicated concepts. You don't have to go out and sift through 12 YouTube videos and six white papers. And if it's not simple enough, you could just ask it to do it in a more simple way. But other interesting applications are friendship, which we can already see emerging and early conversations.

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.