Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

Are important issues regarding the use of artificial intelligence tools getting lost in a swirl of speculation about their emerging “personalities”? A recent article in Popular Science suggests that “humanizing” generative AI chatbots could be distracting programmers and designers “from more serious and immediate dangers of the developing technology.”

The February 17 article, written by Andrew Paul, quotes a number of AI experts who caution against believing the hype that has dominated much of the reporting on these devices. One of these experts, Dr. Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, an associate professor of computer science and engineering at NYU Tandon school of Engineering, observed that a chatbot is nothing more than “a statistical learning machine.” “At the moment,” he adds, we don’t really have any indication that the AI has an ‘inner experience,’ or a personality, or something like that.”