Featured in this episode of Tech News of the Week
There is a new trend afoot. Companies are creating virtual avatars of celebrities in all fields that can be chatted with. The people who are being turned into avatars are not always aware of it, and shall we say, the responses have been mixed.
Facebook did it in October, ostensibly with celebrity permission, for people including Snoop Dogg, Mr Beast, and of course Paris Hilton. Fine. Cute.
Others have been done with no input, such as George Carlin, in an ironically unfunny publicity stunt that Carlin’s daughter strongly condemned, and the American psychologist Martin Seligman. Seligman has been duplicated online as an AI chat bot, based on “every word Seligman had ever written” by a grad student. Same thing happened to Esther Perel. Both these therapists were interested rather than upset, but the wider internet is less thrilled.
For one thing, it is not obvious that if Seligman or Perel wanted the bots taken down that they’d have any kind of legal recourse at all with which to do it. For another, there is a deep concern that people will use these bots in lieu of actual therapy, forgetting that the training was only based on published works- which means that it’s either generic advice, or advice meant for other people in other situations.
Yet another way we are going to be hearing a lot about AI weirdness and its clashes with the law.