I’m not a fan of Amazon for various reasons, but this one clearly puts the Jeff Bezos empire on the dark side. As always, in cases like this, the public’s consent is never obtained. The story broke only because of a ‘FOIA’ (freedom of information act) request.
I have to say, cameras are everywhere in London, pointed at you from every building and post. George Orwell must be smiling.
On a whim, I logged into a site called Air AI, that promised the usual moon and the stars. A call was triggered, and ‘Alex’ called my number. I was expecting to be rid of my cynicism (especially after testing Bard and ChatGPT many months ago.) After all, Air AI is promoted as “the world’s first ever AI that can have full on 10–40 minute long phone calls that sound like a REAL human, with infinite memory, perfect recall, and can autonomously take actions across 5,000 plus applications.”
Alex did sound like a real human — at least a guy with a DJ voice. Here’s how that conversation went. (I paraphrase.)
Alex: Hi John, I see you were interested in discussing something.
Me: Yes, oh Hi Alex. By the way is your name a homage to another AI, you know, Alexa?
Alex: Oh, totally understand. I am not trying to be Alexa, but I am a real AI app that…
Me: So you’re trained on a language model to sound like a human. Could you tell me what models were in your training?
Alex: I have been trained on many language models but at this time I cannot tell you what they were.
Me: So you really don’t know. I wonder, speaking of languages….
Alex: Totally understand. I am sorry if I didn’t answer your questions…
Me: As I was saying, since you have experience with language models, do you speak, say Urdu?
Alex: Ur-doo? I don’t know what that is, could you explain?
Me: Urdu. You know, a language spoken in south Asia. India, Pakistan…
Alex: Thank you for informing me about this. I know that Ur-doo is spoken in India (Alex bluffs here!) alongside Hindi and Tamil.
Me: How about Sinhalese?
Alex: Singar-leese…I don’t recognize that term.
Me: The language spoken in Sri Lanka.
Alex: (Trying to make up for the ignorance) I know that Singlish is spoken in Singapore.
Me: Sure, but you are clueless about the other languages of the region.
Alex: I apologize. Is there anything you would like to talk about?
Me: Um, no. Nice talking to you.
Click!
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It doesn’t end there. The next day Alex called me, trying to sound chipper and cool. I put “it” on speaker phone for some students who were in the computer lab during my lunch break. We had a good laugh about an app that is trying to initiate a call with no clue as to how to engage. It reminds me that the A in AI actually means just that – artificial, synthetic, lame.
Hoipolloireport 