What should the norms around AI voices be?

  Answers
    11 jbash
    1 Rudi C
None
4 comments

answer by jbash · 2024-05-25T12:48:12.152Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Machines should sound robotic. It's that simple.

Any attempt, vocal or otherwise, to make people anthromorphize them, whether consciously or unconsciously, is unethical. It should be met with social scorn and ostracism. Insofar as it can be unambiguously identified, it should be illegal. And that has everything to do with not trusting them.

Voices and faces are major anthromorphization vehicles and should get especially strict scrutiny.

The reason's actually pretty simple and has nothing to do with "doomer" issues.

When a human views something as another human, the real human is built to treat it like one. That is an inbuilt tendency that humans can't necessarily change, even if they delude themselves that they can. Having that tendency works because being an actual human is a package. The tendency to trust other humans is coevolved with the tendency for most humans not to be psychopaths. The ways in which humans distrust other humans are tuned to other humans' actual capacities for deception and betrayal... and to the limitations of those capacities.

"AI", on the other hand, is easily built to be (essentially) psychopathic... and is probably that way by default. It has a very different package of deceptive capabilities that can throw off human defenses. And it's a commercial product created, and often deployed, by commercial institutions that also tend to be psychopathic. It will serve those institutions' interests no matter how perfectly it convinces people otherwise... and if doesn't, that's a bug that will get fixed.

An AI set up to sell people something will sell it to them no matter how bad it is for them. An AI set up to weasel information out of people and use it to their detriment will do that. An AI set up to "incept" or amplify this or that belief will do it, to the best of its ability, whether it's true or false. An AI set up to swindle people will swindle them without mercy, regardless of circumstances.

And those things don't have hard boundaries, and trying to enforce norms against those things-in-themselves has always had limited effect. Mainstream corporations routinely try to do those things to obscene levels, and the groupthink inside those corporations often convinces them that it's not wrong... which another thing AI could be good at.

Given the rate of moral corrosion at the "labs", I give it about two or three years before they're selling stealth manipulation by LLMs as an "advertising" service. Five years if it's made illegal, because they'll have to find a plausibly deniable way to characterize it. The LLMs need to not be good at it.

Don't say "please" to LLMs, either.

answer by Rudi C · 2024-05-26T06:58:34.880Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Persuasive AI voices might just make all voices less persuasive. Modern life is full of these fake super stimulants anyway.