Why Journalists Should Take a Break from Talking to Robots

We need a moratorium on talking to Chatbots until they stop turning banal tech into spectacle and fear mongering

Recently, several tech journalists got scared of robots and decided to write about it. In one case, the story made front page news of the paper of record. The New York Times’ Kevin Roose posted a conversation he had with Bing’s new search AI chatbot and he became worried about the tech. Unfortunately, Roose’s article does very little to educate readers about the technology and instead dolls out some fear mongering about a ghost in the machine.

“When the Google engineer Blake Lemoine was fired last year after claiming that one of the company’s A.I. models, LaMDA, was sentient, I rolled my eyes at Mr. Lemoine’s credulity,” Roose explains. He then follows this up with, “Still, I’m not exaggerating when I say my two-hour conversation with Sydney [the nickname he gave the Bing bot] was the strangest experience I’ve ever had with a piece of technology. It unsettled me so deeply that I had trouble sleeping afterward.”

😑

C’mon Kevin.