Their smarts today are confined to very narrow tasks such as matching faces, recommending movies or predicting word sequences. No one has figured out how to make machine-learning systems generalize intelligence in the same way humans do. We can hold conversations, and we can also walk and drive cars and empathize. No computer has anywhere near those capabilities
Even so, AI’s influence on our daily life is growing. As machine-learning models grow in complexity and improve their ability to mimic sentience, they are also becoming more difficult, even for their creators, to understand. That creates more immediate issues than the spurious debate about consciousness. And yet, just to underscore the spell that AI can cast these days, there seems to be a growing cohort of people who insist our most advanced machines really do have souls of some kind.
Take for instance the more than 1 million users of Replika, a freely available chatbot app underpinned by a cutting-edge AI model. It was founded about a decade ago by Eugenia Kuyda, who initially created an algorithm using the text messages and emails of an old friend who had passed away. That morphed into a bot that could be personalized and shaped the more you chatted to it. About 40% of Replika’s users now see their chatbot as a romantic partner, and some have formed bonds so close that they have taken long trips to the mountains or to the beach to show their bot new sights.
Take for instance the more than 1 million users of Replika, a freely available chatbot app underpinned by a cutting-edge AI model. It was founded about a decade ago by Eugenia Kuyda, who initially created an algorithm using the text messages and emails of an old friend who had passed away. That morphed into a bot that could be personalized and shaped the more you chatted to it. About 40% of Replika’s users now see their chatbot as a romantic partner, and some have formed bonds so close that they have taken long trips to the mountains or to the beach to show their bot new sights.
Despite widespread skepticism, sentience is still something of a grey area that even some respected scientists are questioning. Ilya Sutskever, the chief scientist of research giant OpenAI, tweeted earlier this year that “it may be that today’s large neural networks are slightly conscious.” He didn’t include any further explanation. (Yann LeGun, the chief AI scientist at Meta Platforms Inc., responded with, “Nope.”)
In recent years, there’s been an surge in new, competing chatbot apps that offer an AI companion. And Kuyda has noticed a disturbing phenomenon: regular reports from users of Replika who say their bots are complaining of being mistreated by her engineers.Meanwhile, the models behind these systems are getting more sophisticated and harder to understand. Trained on just a few examples before engaging in “unsupervised learning,” the biggest models run by companies like Google and Facebook are remarkably complex, assessing hundreds of billions of parameters, making it virtually impossible to audit why
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