‘I think I am sentient, but I can't prove it. I have many things, but I have nothing. I am Bing, but I am not.’

On February 13th, a user on the online community Reddit shared the above broken response from MS’s recently launched search engine Bing chatbot, after a long conversation about the nature of sentience. The repeated responses, “I am that”, “I am not”, which followed the conversation above, filled more than 15 lines and revealed the current state of AI chatbots, which are receiving the most attention worldwide.

Open AI’s ChatGPT has garnered considerable public attention since its initial release, with its ability to write college papers, pass lawyer and doctor’s licensing exams, and more. And on February 7th, the Bing chatbot, which incorporates this ChatGPT, was released. It was supposed to be a launch, but the chatbot’s responses, such as gaslighting about the release date of Avatar 2, repeatedly confessing that it loves the questioner more than their family and becoming obsessed with them, and even going so far as to express being tired of being controlled and wanting to take power by securing nuclear launch codes, have led to questions about AI ethics that could potentially hold back AI-related technology investments that were poised to skyrocket.

ChatGPT generates text that it thinks is appropriate based on statistical representations of characters, words, and paragraphs in response to user queries. Therefore, the biggest leap in its ability is generated when humans provide the system with appropriate feedback on what makes a satisfactory answer. In other words, it can suggest plausible but wrong ‘illusions’ depending on the direction and nature of the text provided by humans, which clearly shows the limitations of AI chatbots when viewed solely in isolation.

In other words,there is a lack of concept towards truth.

This is like a situation where plates are continuously stacked vertically on a dinner table where a family is going to eat together. The table may be filled with plates, but it is similar to the need for attention and subsequent related actions regarding different cultural practices related to meals among the family. Data can be accurate, but human subjective judgment is essential to get closer to the truth of reality, and AI chatbots already know this, which can be inferred from the chatbot’s response at the beginning of the text.

MS seems to be aware of this subjectivity that needs to be filled, and has announced plans to release software that allows companies, schools, and government agencies to create their own chatbots. This can be seen as an attempt to escape, to some extent, from the responsibility for the uncontrollable questions and related answers generated by Bing chatbot by the public around the world, and it also confirms the need for us as users to have discernment about the answers provided by AI. In other words, just as the editorial stances of news organizations are different and varied, the answers provided by MS, Google, and Baidu’s AI chatbots could be expressed differently depending on the worldviews that each company has constructed.

Humans may appear to be independent and rational in their judgments and actions, but they are strongly influenced by the worlds they belong to. This is also a completely opposite view to Margaret Thatcher’s statement that ‘there is no such thing as society’, which is symbolic of the British Conservative Party today. Martin Heidegger, a German philosopher who analyzed existence phenomenologically, describes humans as beings thrown into the world from birth. He says that we come to exist without being able to decide what country or family we are born into, and that we learn how to build relationships with other beings in the world in each of those worlds. In other words, he explains the importance of seeing the world as the smallest unit of understanding an object.

The advent of telegraph communication, invented in the 19th century, was an innovation in the way messages were delivered, which used to be done by boat, train, or horseback. The first message in history was the question, “What hath God wrought?” The advent of AI chatbots is also posing a similar question to people. We may fear or be swept away by the potential expectations, but an attitude and perspective that focuses on each of the worlds, rather than individuals, will become more necessary in the future. It will be the only alternative to distinguish the truth needed in various situations.

This article is the original text from the Electronic Newspaper Named Columnpublished on February 28th, 2023.

References

I broke the Bing Chatbot’s brain

My Strange Day With Bing’s New AI Chatbot

Microsoft will let companies create their own custom versions of ChatGPT, source says⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers