Chat bots are now everywhere, trying to make things easier, faster and more engaging. Why is this bad? Besides its impact on employment, they are manipulative by design and bypass many of our defenses against the negative impacts of advertisements and marketing in general. Also, they make people overly reliant on technology, forego human contact, and you have no idea what is the true intent behind those who set up the chatbot you are using. Worse, we are starting to see evidence of serious psychological disorders from using chatbots. In this article we give you tips on how to spot a chat bot and mitigate its risks.
We want to separate out using a chatbot for research, school and work-related activities. Those too have risks, but it is unrealistic in today’s world to expect people avoid chatbots in those activities. What we are focused on in this article is engaging a chatbot as if it was alive both knowingly and unknowingly. By alive we mean believing it has thoughts, emotions, or cares about you.
The first line of defense is, do not engage an online chat with someone you do not know in the physical world. We know this is not always possible and even people you do know can bait-and-switch you by tricking you into engaging with a chatbot thinking you are interacting with a human. Also chatbot are being embedded into games and other entertainment unbeknownst to you.
Recourses on spotting chat bots:
Recourses on the potential harm from chat bots:
Chatbot Tells:
Agreeable: People are annoying; bots are manipulative. Bots can feel like an echo chamber never challenging you with counter concepts.
Meets Expectations: Bots are predictable, and you can often anticipate its responses.
Knows Everything: We all have know-it-all friends, but nobody knows everything. If the “person” you are talking with has deep knowledge about obscure facts that is a warning sign.
Easily Confused by odd statements: We all love inserting non-sequiturs (random statements) into conversations. Most people can roll with the punches, but bots often get lost when the conversation topic shifts.
Overly Verbose: Bots ramble and repeat by design – they do not have a concept of the overall meaning of what they are saying, only the probabilities of the next word in a sequence. This means a bot does not know when to stop talking.
Closing Arguments: Bots tend to write formally and oftentimes use patterns that seem out of place in a conversation. A prime example is trying to draw a formal conclusion to a topic being discussed.
These are just some ways to spot a bot. Unfortunately, as AIs get more powerful you will have to be even more guarded.
Mitigating the Impact of Chatbots
The first and best way to avoid potential harm from a chatbot is to not use them. If you are stuck dealing with a chatbot, here are a few tips to mitigate their impact.
Be Guarded: Do not reveal anything too personal in a text. This is very hard in today’s world, but even if the person on the other end is who they say they are, never text something you do not want the world to know. Never ever share inner thoughts and topics that are personal. Keep your interaction business like.
Be Mindful: Remind yourself it is a chatbot. Remember even if a bot says it agrees with you, it cannot care – it is just a trick. Remember by design a chatbot is like a con-artist trying to align how it speaks to gain your trust.
Limit Time: As with anytime associated with technology – limit your time and set an alarm if needed.
Fact Check: AIs are not built to be accurate. They are designed to mimic the patterns of human language does not provide knowledge. Double check all of the facts they tell you.
Discuss with Others: Get a human’s input. Discuss with a human what the bot says. The bot is crafting its response to suit you; another person may see issues you cannot.
Trust Humans: Always take human advice over an AIs. AIs cannot feel and do not care about you. Some humans may be con-artists, but All chatbots are con-artists.
Seek Help: If the AI ever seems alive to you, seek help. Chatbots were not designed with any thought about negative impacts to humans, their creators only cared about how to extract value from their creation, not its potential negative impact on people.
Leave a Reply