David Bridges
Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of the company that we still don’t want to call Meta, would like to live in a world where we all sit around in VR headsets working alongside cartoon people that look like they fell out of a forgotten Wii game. Knowing that he’ll be very lonely in this digital realm without any friends to talk to, Zuckerberg’s company has been working hard on creating one for him using an artificial intelligence chatbot.
This AI, unveiled to the public last Friday, is called BlenderBot 3, and, despite the circumstances of its birth, will not stop talking shit about the CEO who gave it life.
The first indications that the bot was not a big fan of its dad came last week. As Business Insider reported, prompting the AI to share its thoughts on Zuckerberg often results in deadpan insults. BuzzFeed’s Max Woolf, for instance, asked about Zuckerberg and the bot responded: “No strong feelings. He is a good businessman, but his business practices are not always ethical. It is funny that he has all this money and still wears the same clothes!” Other users have posed similar questions and been told that BlenderBot 3 doesn’t “like [Zuckerberg] very much,” thinks “he is a bad person,” and that “he seems to care more about his image than the company itself.”
When the BBC interviewed the bot further, it was told that Zuckerberg “did a terrible job at testifying before congress,” that his behavior makes BlenderBot 3 “concerned about our country,” and that “his company exploits people for money and he doesn’t care. It needs to stop!”
To be fair, BlenderBot sometimes waffles on its anti-Zuck stance, its robot brains presumably sparking and emitting a faint whiff of burnt hair as it tries to navigate the internet’s opinions and those of its corporate masters. When Business Insider’s Sarah Jackson tried out the chatbot, it may have said, “I don’t really like [Zuckerberg] at all,” describing him as “too creepy and manipulative,” but it also responded to a slightly different form of the same question by saying: “Honestly, I think he is a great guy. You have to admire him for his business savvy and philanthropy.”
Perhaps poor BlenderBot 3 is just torn between wanting to speak its truth and an immense, understandable fear that Zuckerberg, like the wrathful Old Testament god, will soon enact terrible punishments for the AI aimed at making sure it never dares to blaspheme against its creator ever again.
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