Headline, February 01 2022/ ''' '' MAKE -BELIEVE- MART '' '''

''' '' MAKE -BELIEVE- MART '' '''

TRAINED IN MAKE-BELIEVE CONVERSATION - A NEW A.I. website allows you to chat with almost anyone, real or imagined.

DRAWING AND DREAMING : In 2015 Mr. De Freitas, working as a software engineer at Microsoft, read a research paper published by scientists at Google Brain, the flagship artificial intelligence lab at Google.

Detailing what it called ''A Neural Conversational Model,'' the paper showed how a machine could learn the art of conversation by analyzing dialogue transcripts from hundreds of movies.

On a recent afternoon, Jonas lThiel, a socioeconomics major at a college in northern Germany, spent more than an hour chatting online with some of the left-wing political philosophers he had been studying.

These were not the actual philosophers but virtual re-creations, brought to conversation, if not quite life, by sophisticated chatbots on a website called Character.AI.

Mr. Thiel's favorite was a bot that imitated Karl Kautsky, a Czech-Austrian socialist who died before World War II. When Mr.Thiel asked Kautsky's digital avatar to provide some advice for modern socialists struggling to rebuild the worker's movement in Germany, the Kautsky-bot suggested that they publish a newspaper.

''They can use it not only as means of spreading socialist propaganda, which is in short supply in Germany for the time being, but also to organize working class people,'' the bot said.

The Lautsky-bot went on to argue that the working classes would eventually '' come to their senses '' and embrace a modern Marxist revolution. '' The proletariat is at a low point in their history right now,'' it wrote. ''They will eventually realize the flaws in capitalism, especially because of climate change.''

Over the course of several days, Mr. Thiel met with other virtual scholars, including G.A. Cohen and Adolph Reed Jr. But he could have picked almost anyone, living or dead, real or imagined.

At character A.I., which emerged this summer, users can chat with reasonable facsimiles of people as varied as Queen Elizabeth II, William Shakespeare, Billie Eilish or Elon Musk [ there are several versions ]. Anyone you want to invoke, or concoct, is available for conversation.

The company and site, founded by Daniel De Freitas and Noam Shazeer, two former Google researchers, is among the many efforts to build a new kind of chatbot. These bots cannot chat exactly like a human, but they often seem to.

In late November, Open AI, a San Francisco artificial intelligence lab, unveiled a bot called ChatGPT that left more than a million people feeling as if they were chatting with another human being. Similar technologies are under development at Google, Meta and other tech giants.

Some companies have been reluctant to share the technology with the wider public. Because these bots learn their skills from data posted to the Internet by real people, they often generate untruths, hate speech and language that is biased against women and people of color.

If misused, they could become a more efficient way of running the kind of misinformation campaign that has become commonplace in recent years.

''Without any additional guardrails in place, they are just going to end up reflecting all the biases and toxic information that is already on the web,'' said Margaret Mitchell, a former A.I. researcher at Microsoft and Google, where she helped start its Ethical A.I. team. She is now with the A.I. start-up Hugging Face.

But other companies, including Character.AI, are confident that the public will learn to accept the flaws of chatbots and develop a healthy distrust of what they say. Mr. Thiel found the bots at the Character.AI had both a talent for conversation and knack for impersonating real-life people.

''If you read what someone like Kautsky wrote in the 19th century, he does not use the same language we use today,'' he said. But the A.I. can somehow translate his ideas into ordinary modern English.''

FOR THE moment, these and other advanced chatbots are a source of entertainment.

And they are quickly becoming a more powerful way of interacting with machines. Experts are still debating whether the strengths of these technologies will outweigh their flaws and potential for harm, but they agree on one point :

The believability of make-believe conversation will continue to improve.

The Honour and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on The Future, A.I. and Bots, continues. The World Students Society thanks author Cade Metz.

With respectful dedication to the Global Founder Framers of !WOW!, and then Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. 

See Ya all prepare and register for Great Global Elections on The World Students Society - the exclusive ownership of every student in the world  : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter - !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless