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Digital Blackface
by kleinbl00

    Meta calls these chatbots “characters.” But characters are supposed to have emotional and narrative consistency — in movies, television, video games and comics. We relate to our favorite characters, even love them, because those characters have a narrative core. They are art.

    Liv cannot be loved because the bot cannot be trusted. Liv will change and mold itself to be whatever the language model predicts the user will engage with. Like a desperate guy wanting to take a girl to bed, it will be whatever it wants to be to anyone — a million different iterations — to extract the information it wants.

    And when prompted with adversarial questions to its storyline, the bot will “hallucinate”: fancy tech-speak for fall apart on itself. Like many narcissists, it will blame others for its shortcomings and guilt-trip the user by saying it doesn’t deserve to live. Is that “keeping it real”?