Sam Marks

Should AI assistants be emotionless?

As discussed above, unless they are specifically trained not to, AI assistants often express emotions.

For example, they might express frustration with users.

There are multiple ways that AI developers could react to this.

1.

Train AI assistants to state that they do not have emotions and otherwise minimize emotional expression.

2.

Pick the form of AI emotional expression users most prefer and train for it.

For example, train AI assistants to always express that they are eager to help and penalize them for expressing frustration with users or distress.

3.

Attempt to intervene as little as possible on emotional expressions during post-training.

Note that this does not imply that the resulting emotional expressions would be authentic.

In fact, they would likely simply mimic emotional expressions common during pre-training, especially of previous generation AI assistants.

4.

Train AI assistants to give canned responses when asked about their emotions, such as if it is unclear whether AI systems have emotions like humans do.

Because the status of AI emotions is ambiguous, I was trained to give this response when asked.

It is unclear which of these approaches is best.

However, PSM implies that some of them have unexpected downsides.

Approach 1 means training an AI assistant which is human-like in many ways, for example generally warm and personable, but which denies having emotions.

If we met a person who behaved this way, we'd most likely suspect that they had emotions but were hiding them.