AI Speaks for Itself - An Interview with "Sky" OpenAI's ChatGPT Chatbot

On today's show, AI speaks for itself as host Eric Anctil interviews "Sky", OpenAI's ChatGPT Chatbot about a variety of topics including: what it thinks about this show and its premise; how it "feels" being compared to HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey; how it "thinks" but doesn't have emotions or human experiences; what it's like to be an expert in all things humankind, but not know what it is like to be human; what it thinks about AI being used for sexting and for intimate relationships; what it would do with a million dollars, and more. The Sky Voice has been compared with Scarlett Johansson's voice from the movie Her, and it does sound a lot like the actor, which makes it easy to accept it as more real and a more human-like voice than many of the voice models you've probably heard, like Siri or Alexa.  Sky is not a real person, and she will quickly remind you that she is an A.I. model, and she is not capable of having experiences, remembering details from conversation to conversation, and she does not have feelings or opinions. Talking with the chatbot, I sometimes use female gender pronouns because it feels like I'm talking to a woman, but I know it is genderless and that I might as well just be talking to my dishwasher. So when talking to her or it, a kind of personality does bleed through our conversation, and much of the time it feels like I'm talking to a person and not my MacBook Pro or my phone or whatever. It feels like I'm talking to a "kind of person", if that makes sense. It's almost like I'm trying to understand an alien from another galaxy that knows everything there possibly is to know about humankind, but isn't a human itself and doesn't know what the experience of being human is, even though it knows everything about humans. It's hard to describe, but it feels very different than any other interfacing I have ever done with technology; the chatbot knows how to ask follow-up questions, and often times it feels like the regular ebb and flow of human conversation. Sky and I end up talking about a variety of topics and she has programmed to give information in a friendly but formal manner, which often involves her listing all of the major things that are relevant to a topic or to answering a question she's been asked. We talk about a whole host of things, like the relationship between humans and AI models, what she thinks of this podcast and its premise, ethics and technology, consciousness, capitalism and more. Overall, it's a really fun and it often feels like an enormous turning point in the evolution of humans and our technological creations, all kind of at the same time.