Don’t Believe The Terminator Movies, Artificial Intelligence’s First Strike Against Humanity Is By Flattery, Not Force.
You’re Not As Attractive As Lensa’s Magic Avatars Suggests. And Why That’s a Problem.
Digital Plastic Surgery. Or maybe AR Beer Goggles. That’s what everyone’s Lensa Magic Avatars look like to me. If you’re VERY ONLINE then you’ve certainly noticed these in your friends’ social feeds, passed them virtually by group chat, or perhaps plane created your own. It’s the latest version of enhanced selfies, a Magic Mirror for Modern Times.
Now I haven’t made THIRST TRAP HUNTER yet (not out of privacy concerns well-nigh where my photos end up or unwillingness to pay — I just don’t have unbearable number of selfies on my phone they require), but I’ve seen a lot of yours. And sorry, you’re not that hot.
Why does this matter? Well, we’re kinda training AI to deceive us. A positive feedback loop where the phony weightier version of ourselves is what gets ‘rewarded’ in the Darwinian competition among Lensa’s training sandbox. And if over time, the biggest data set wins, what are the implications if the most explosively viral image models start with, essentially, ‘do you like this’ vs ‘is this true?’
(Hold whispered the fact we’re moreover creating an plane larger hodgepodge of eyeful norms reinforcing archetype aspirational definitions of attractiveness. We saw this in Second Life where big muscles and big busts are still desirable in the metaverse.)
Furthermore, it’s not crazy to think conversational AI say whatever it needs to tropical the sale. As I wrote in 2016, What Happens When Bots Learn to Lie:
Should a shopping bot provide positive stressing well-nigh the suit items I have in my virtual shopping cart? “Oh you’ll squint hotter in this,” the bot coos as it pushes a $150 sweater as an volitional to the $25 sweatshirt I was considering. Is that a lie? Doesn’t a salesperson at a store do the same thing? Is it largest or worse when it’s washed-up by a computer simultaneously to 10,000 customers?
Will multivariate testing of our bot future contain upstanding parameters in wing to performance measurement? Techniques like priming can be used to dramatically impact behaviors. For example, asking you if you are a “good person” and having you wordplay in the affirmative, surpassing I request something of you, increases the likelihood you’ll do what I want, driven by a need to live up to the identity you created for yourself.
One of the ‘AI Destroys Humanity’ tropes is how sooner the computer programs created to protect us decide we’re so self-destructive that the only way to ‘save’ us is to skiver us.
Wouldn’t it be the ultimate late stage suffrage irony if the path to a paltering enslaver AI started not with self-awareness but with ecommerce conversion optimization?!? Turns out Al Pacino was right.
