Generative AI such as ChatGPT have been carrying on interactive online conversations meant to ... [ ] manipulate humans, raising serious concerns, We've all dealt with those manipulative personalities that try to convince us that up is down and aim to gaslight us into the most unsettling of conditions. Their rhetoric can be overtly powerful and overwhelming. You can't decide what to do. Should you merely cave in and hope that the verbal tirade will end? But if you are played into doing something untoward, acquiescing might be quite endangering. Trying to verbally fight back is bound to be ugly and can devolve into even worse circumstances. It can be a no-win situation, that's for sure. The manipulator wants and demands that things go their way. For them, the only win possible is that you completely capitulate to their professed bidding. They will incessantly verbally pound away with their claims of pure logic and try to make it appear as though they are occupying the high ground. You are made to seem inconsequential and incapable. Any number of verbal tactics will be launched at you, over and over again. Repetition and steamrolling are the insidious tools of those maddening manipulators. Turns out that we not only need to be on the watch for humans that are manipulators, but we now also need to be wary of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that does likewise. AI can be a masterful manipulator of humans. When it comes to AI, there is the hoped-for AI For Good, while in the same breath, we are faced with AI For Bad. I've previously covered in my columns that AI is considered to have a dual-use capacity, see my analysis at the link here. Seems that if we can make AI that can generate amazingly fluent and upbeat essays, the same capacity can be readily switched over to produce tremendously wrongful bouts of fluently overbearing manipulations. This is especially impactful when experienced in an interactive conversational dialogue with the AI. All of this happens via a type of AI known as Generative AI.

Attempts to ban generative AI such as ChatGPT are not all they are cracked up to be. To ban, or not to ban, that is the question. I would guess that if Shakespeare were around nowadays, he might have said something like that about the recent efforts to ban the use of a type of AI known as Generative AI, which is especially exemplified and popularized due to an AI app called ChatGPT. Some high-profile entities have been attempting to ban the use of ChatGPT. For example, the New York City (NYC) Department of Education recently announced that they were proceeding to block access to ChatGPT on its various networks and connected devices. The reported rationale for the ban consisted of indications that this AI app and the overall use of generative AI seemingly portend negative consequences for student learning. Students that opt to use ChatGPT are said to be undercutting the development of their crucial critical-thinking skills and undermining the growth of their problem-solving abilities. On top of those rather stoutly worrisome qualms, there is the undisputed fact that such AI can produce inaccurate outputs that contain errors and other factual maladies. The dangerous icing on the cake is the imagined possibility that the outputs could potentially be used in an unsafe manner by students that unknowingly rely upon said falsehoods. No such documented harms have yet surfaced that I've seen, so we'll need to just take at face value that this could potentially happen (I have discussed the range of possibilities in my postings; for example, some have posited that generative AI essays could tell someone to take medicines that they should not be taking or provide mental health advice that ought to be proffered by human mental health professionals, etc.).

Latest buzz is that AI ought to have a warning or safety sign to let humankind know they are dealing ... [ ] with AI. Your daily activities are undoubtedly bombarded with a thousand or more precautionary warnings of one kind or another. Most of those are handy and altogether thoughtful signs or labels that serve to keep us hopefully safe and secure. Please be aware that I snuck a few "outliers" on the list to make some noteworthy points. For example, some people believe it is nutty that baby strollers have an affixed label that warns you to not fold the stroller while the baby is still seated within the contraption. Though the sign is certainly appropriate and dutifully useful, it would seem that basic common sense would already be sufficient. What person would not of their own mindful volition realize that they first need to remove the baby? Well, others emphasize that such labels do serve an important purpose. First, someone might truly be oblivious that they need to remove the baby before folding up the stroller.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is real, albiet maturing slowly. You experience it when you talk to Alexa, when you see a creepily-targeted online ad, and when Netxflix turns you on to Stranger Things. Oh yea, and that self-driving car over there is AI super-powered! AI is indeed cool, but many are scared about how it ultimatley may impact society. Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and even the Woz warned that "...artificial intelligence can potentially be more dangerous than nuclear war."

Artificial intelligence (AI) is real, albiet maturing slowly. You experience it when you talk to Alexa, when you see a creepily-targeted online ad, and when Netxflix turns you on toStranger Things. Oh yea, and that self-driving car over there is AI super-powered! AI is indeed cool, but many are scared about how it ultimatley may impact society. Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and even the Woz warned that "…artificial intelligence can potentially be more dangerous than nuclear war."

How did you become interested in artificial intelligence (AI)? I am a documentary filmmaker, writer and speaker. I was making a film around 15 years ago about AI and got to speak to some of the major players in the field, including Ray Kurzweil, the Director of Engineering at Google who started the singularity industry, and Rodney Brookes, the premier roboticist of our time who founded iRobot (a company that created the Roomba vaccum cleaner and robots for military use) and then established a company called Rethink Robotics. Both Kurzweil and Brookes were optimistic about the time when we will share the planet with smarter-than-human machines – and I was too. I was, and still am, a gigantic proponent of AI, despite my book's title Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era.