Journalists Keep Anthropomorphizing A.I. ⇥ aisnakeoil.substack.com

I appreciated this short piece from Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor. The more products like these transform from the vaguely personable — something like Siri — into full-blown conversation simulators, the more wary journalists and pundits need to be of becoming too enamoured of their pseudo-human qualities. Note how the cautious names given to the products by Microsoft and OpenAI — Bing Chat and ChatGPT, respectively — are unlike the more human-sounding “Alexa” and “Siri”.

Update: See also Parker Molloy’s question-and-answer interview with ChatGPT demonstrating how ridiculous this is.