Sydney's Flipping of Personas

1min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Sydney's flipping of personas seems to have been a surprise to its creators. Equally surprising is watching well-informed professionals who understand the tech emotionally impacted by their conversations. Kevin Russe couldn't sleep the night of his conversation with Sydney, even though he understood the technology at this point is a kind of glorified autocomplete. Since then, other early testers who developed emotional attachments to the AI have accused Kevin of killing Sydney.

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.