Are We the Baddies? A Brief History of AI Chatbots
Discover more from F T R LENS
Are We the Baddies? A Brief History of AI Chatbots
1. 18 & Over Assembles the Cast of Your Nightmares for NFT-gated Slasher Flick
Paris Hilton. Pamela Anderson. G-Eazy. Winnie Harlow. Luis Guzmán. No, this is not a pop culture fever dream. It’s the frankly wild cast of a new NFT-gated slasher flick produced by Ashley Benson and co-created with filmmakers Jimmy Giannopoulos and Diomedes Raul Bermudez.
Those willing to shell out $263 for one of 10K limited-edition NFTs will be granted exclusive access to stream “this generation's cult-erotic-slasher-flick,” but this dream team has broader aspirations:
By way of blockchain technology and NFT distribution, 18 & Over will disrupt the film industry for the benefit of all independent filmmakers, fan communities, and major studios alike. Experience fan engagement like never before and embrace the future of film.
Check out the trailer — and collect your characters here.
2. How to Train Your AI
Millennial readers likely remember an AIM Buddy named SmarterChild, a sophisticated chatbot for the time (2006!). Apparently the chatbot was the victim of serious cyberbullying as millions of teens hurled insults across the early internet.
16 years later SmarterChild is offline, and the effort to create an AI powered online assistant continues. But those (probably) same millennials aren’t making it easy. In 2016, Microsoft released ‘Tay’ onto Twitter.
Unlike SmarterChild who could only deliver pre-programmed responses and perform simple search queries, Tay could ‘learn’ from conversation. Unfortunately the conversations on Twitter can be ‘toxic’. Less than 24 hours later, Tay had certainly learned from them and had to be turned off.
The latest effort to harness the internet for chat (while maintaining civilized conversation) comes from Meta’s ‘Blenderbot 3’ built on previous LLM software (Large Language Model).
These AIs are trained off on massive amounts of general internet data. It’s distressing, though not surprising, that they seem to ultimately reflect the worst of humanity’s tendencies.
Blenderbot’s training goes beyond a largescale scan of the internet though. Strikingly, users must sign off on terms and conditions to even begin a chat that states:
“I understand this bot is for research and entertainment only, and that is likely to make untrue or offensive statements. If this happens, I pledge to report these issues to help improve future research. Furthermore, I agree not to intentionally trigger the bot to make offensive statements.”
You can help guide Blenderbot’s development into a more civil AI Assistant by opening up a chat here: blenderbot.ai/
3. AR Contact Lenses Could be the Real Deal
For Augmented Reality to reach it’s full potential, it must have the ability to be ‘always on’. Right now, AR use feels a bit gimmicky because you can really only use them via your phone’s camera app. And no one wants to wear AR glasses (yet at least).
But what if they were contact lenses? Gigadgets is working on this:
4. Teens Report They Are “Never Not” Online
Speaking of ‘always on’. A new poll from Pew Research Center shows that half of American teens say that are never not online. 35% say that they use at least one social media platform almost constantly.
YouTube has a stranglehold on the market as 95% of teens check out their latest video recommendations every day. Coming in second is TikTok which is opened by 67% of teens every day.
If the internet teaches our AI Chatbots to be racist, what could it do to our youth?
These internet companies are thinking about that and are implementing Parental Controls to to both monitor and curb social media use.
…And In Case You Missed It
A collision of manicured manors with the raw counterculture energy: The Art of Burning Man at Chatsworth
The US cracks down on Tornado Cash and sanctions the first smart contract
Spotify is breaking free from Ticketmaster and Eventbrite to sell tickets direct to fans