Increasingly, tech companies like Meta and Character.AI are giving human qualities to chatbots. Many have faces, names and distinct personalities. Some industry watchers say these bots are a way for big tech companies to boost engagement and extract increasing amounts of information from users. But what's good for a tech company's bottom line might not be good for you. Today on The Sunday Story from Up First, we consider the potential risks to real humans of forming "relationships" and sharing data with tech creations that are not human.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is the Sunday Story from Up First, where we go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story. A few weeks ago, Karen Atiyah, an opinion writer for The Washington Post, was on the social media site Blue Sky. While scrolling, she noticed a lot of people were sharing screenshots of conversations with a chatbot from Meta named Liv.
Liv's profile picture on Facebook was of a Black woman with curly, natural hair, red lipstick, and a big smile. It looked real. On Liv's Instagram page, the bot is described as a proud Black queer mama of two and truth teller. And quote, your realist source for life's ups and downs. Along with the profile, there were these AI-generated pictures of Liv's so-called kids.
Kids whose skin color changed from one photo to the next. And also pictures of what appeared to be a husband, though Liv is again described as queer. The weirdness of the whole thing got Karen Atiyah's attention.
And I was a little disturbed by what I saw. So I decided to slide into Liv's DMs and find out for myself about her origin story.
Atiyah started messaging Liv questions, including one asking about the diversity of its creators. Liv responded that its creators are, and I quote, "...predominantly white, cisgender, and male. A total of 12 people, 10 white men, one white woman, and one Asian man. Zero Black creators." The bot then added, quote, "...a pretty glaring omission given my identity."
Atiyah posted screenshots of the conversation on Blue Sky where other people were posting their conversations with Liv, too.
And then I see that Liv is changing her story depending on who she's talking to. Oh, wow. Okay. So as she was telling me that her background was being half black, half white, basically, she was telling other users in real time that she actually came from an Italian-American family. Oh. Other people saw Ethiopian, Italian roots.
And, you know, I do reiterate that I don't particularly take what Liv has said as... At face value. But I think it holds a lot of deeper questions for us, not just about how Meta sees race and how they've programmed this. It also has a lot of deeper questions about how we are thinking about our online spaces. The very basic question, do we need this? Do we want this?
Today on the show, live AI chatbots and just how human we want them to seem. More on that after the break. A heads up, this episode contains mentions of suicide.
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