AI Is Becoming More Conversant. But Will It Get More Honest?

On a recent afternoon Jonas Thiel, a socioeconomics major at a college in northern Germany, spent more than an hour chatting online with some of the left-wing political philosophers he had been studying. These were not the actual philosophers but virtual recreations, brought to conversation, if not quite life, by sophisticated chatbots on a website called Character.AI. Mr. Thiel's favorite was a bot that imitated Karl Kautsky, a Czech-Austrian socialist who died before World War Two. When Mr. Thiel asked Kautsky's digital avatar to provide some advice for modern-day socialists struggling to rebuild the worker's movement in Germany, Kautsky-bot suggested that they launch a newspaper. "They can use it not only as a means of spreading socialist propaganda, which is in short supply in Germany for the time being, but also to organize working class people," the bot said. Kautsky-bot went on to argue that the working classes would eventually "come to their senses" and embrace a modern-day Marxist revolution.