I don’t have to use AI for work or anything, I’ve just dicked around with CoPilot a bit, and found it so frustrating that I generally end up yelling at it. That has led me to think about ethics, and how we should treat AI agents/models/whatever.
It feels naturally to say please and thank you, but do I owe that to a computer? Do I owe it ANY politeness at all? Should I berate it when it does something incredibly stupid, which is EVERY time I use it? I wouldn’t treat a human employee that way, even if they were stupid, so why should I treat an AI any differently? Should I treat it with respect, no matter what?
On the other hand, it’s not human, it doesn’t appreciate my politeness, nor is it offended by my insults.
However, what effect does treating the AI disrespectfully have on my own psyche? When you treat people disrespectfully, it eventually wears down your own morality, and makes you a worse person. Wouldn’t treating an AI disrespectfully reinforce those same bad behaviors, and be just as effective in making me a worse person?
So now I’m thinking that I need to be polite and respectful to an AI, not for their sake, but for my own.
But then aren’t I just being a little bitch to an AI created by the worst humans on the planet? Essentially altering my behavior towards AI, and their efforts to destroy humanity in multiple ways, because I’m afraid of how it will change ME for the worse? Haven’t they just manipulated me into behaving how they want me to behave: respectful and polite to their Frankenstein’s Monster?
So do I act politely, or rudely toward an AI? I haven’t decided yet, so right now I’m trying to remain neutral, but I still end up screaming at it.
I am absolutely ruthless to the AI on the rare occasion that I use it in voice mode. My philosophy is that if I’m abusive to it, it guarantees that wall between how I interact with humans and how I interact with AI stays up. Kind of like a reminder that it’s not real. I also just find it super amusing.
But also, if I’m typing, I’m not going to waste my time calling it a useless piece of shit.
I fully expect eventually this behavior will get me labeled as an actual abusive person because the whole world has gone insane, and being the last lucid person on earth is stressful. What i haven’t decided is how much I actually care about this.
It’s natural to anthropomorphise the chatbot, but being polite to them legitimises them in your own mind as a more real entity. Essentially, it’s a cognitive trap. Secondly, the AI CEOs love it because they want everyone thinking it’s a real intelligence, and third it’s bad because it burns more power. Every bit of conversational pleasantry is another input that gets tokenised and processed, so it’s just wasting cycles and storage - and AI is predominantly powered by fossil fuels.
Treat them like what they are: tools, and pretty bad tools at that. Give them precise and minimal instructions - it’s just a computer program.
It’s a statistics engine that turns a natural language request into a probable terminal command. It’s not that deep. Do it if you find it makes the probability of a decent guess improve.
I don’t have to use AI for work or anything, I’ve just dicked around with CoPilot a bit, and found it so frustrating that I generally end up yelling at it. That has led me to think about ethics, and how we should treat AI agents/models/whatever.
It feels naturally to say please and thank you, but do I owe that to a computer? Do I owe it ANY politeness at all? Should I berate it when it does something incredibly stupid, which is EVERY time I use it? I wouldn’t treat a human employee that way, even if they were stupid, so why should I treat an AI any differently? Should I treat it with respect, no matter what?
On the other hand, it’s not human, it doesn’t appreciate my politeness, nor is it offended by my insults.
However, what effect does treating the AI disrespectfully have on my own psyche? When you treat people disrespectfully, it eventually wears down your own morality, and makes you a worse person. Wouldn’t treating an AI disrespectfully reinforce those same bad behaviors, and be just as effective in making me a worse person?
So now I’m thinking that I need to be polite and respectful to an AI, not for their sake, but for my own.
But then aren’t I just being a little bitch to an AI created by the worst humans on the planet? Essentially altering my behavior towards AI, and their efforts to destroy humanity in multiple ways, because I’m afraid of how it will change ME for the worse? Haven’t they just manipulated me into behaving how they want me to behave: respectful and polite to their Frankenstein’s Monster?
So do I act politely, or rudely toward an AI? I haven’t decided yet, so right now I’m trying to remain neutral, but I still end up screaming at it.
I am absolutely ruthless to the AI on the rare occasion that I use it in voice mode. My philosophy is that if I’m abusive to it, it guarantees that wall between how I interact with humans and how I interact with AI stays up. Kind of like a reminder that it’s not real. I also just find it super amusing.
But also, if I’m typing, I’m not going to waste my time calling it a useless piece of shit.
I fully expect eventually this behavior will get me labeled as an actual abusive person because the whole world has gone insane, and being the last lucid person on earth is stressful. What i haven’t decided is how much I actually care about this.
supplemental option: don’t act toward AI
This.
It’s natural to anthropomorphise the chatbot, but being polite to them legitimises them in your own mind as a more real entity. Essentially, it’s a cognitive trap. Secondly, the AI CEOs love it because they want everyone thinking it’s a real intelligence, and third it’s bad because it burns more power. Every bit of conversational pleasantry is another input that gets tokenised and processed, so it’s just wasting cycles and storage - and AI is predominantly powered by fossil fuels.
Treat them like what they are: tools, and pretty bad tools at that. Give them precise and minimal instructions - it’s just a computer program.
It’s a statistics engine that turns a natural language request into a probable terminal command. It’s not that deep. Do it if you find it makes the probability of a decent guess improve.