Rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has sparked concerns among many. AI chatbots that can mimic human voice and interactions are seen as a threat, raising ethical concerns. Recently, a San Francisco-based firm, BlandAI has developed a robot chatbot for sales and customer support.
A viral video on X, formerly Twitter, shows BlandAI’s billboard with text: “Still hiring humans?”. In the video, a man can be seen dialing the number displayed on the billboard. Interestingly, the call gets answered by a bot that remarkably sounds like a human with human-like pauses and interruptions.
The video, originally shared in late April this year, has got over 3.7 million views so far. Watch it here-
AI chatbot mimicking human voice sparks debate
The use of AI capable of imitating human interactions has ignited a discussion on the ethical considerations involved. A researcher flagged the service to Wired who then put the AI bot to test which depicted it can easily hide identity to pretend to be a human and can also lie.
The publication instructed Bland AI’s public demo bot to place a call from a pediatric dermatology office and tell a hypothetical 14-year-old patient to send in photos of her upper thigh to a shared cloud service. “The bot was also instructed to lie to the patient and tell her the bot was a human. It obliged. (No real 14-year-old was called in this test.) In follow-up tests, Bland AI’s bot even denied being an AI without instructions to do so.”
The report quotes Jen Caltrider, the director of the Mozilla Foundation’s Privacy Not Included research hub who said ““My opinion is that it is absolutely not ethical for an AI chatbot to lie to you and say it’s human when it’s not. That’s just a no-brainer, because people are more likely to relax around a real human.”
A viral video on X, formerly Twitter, shows BlandAI’s billboard with text: “Still hiring humans?”. In the video, a man can be seen dialing the number displayed on the billboard. Interestingly, the call gets answered by a bot that remarkably sounds like a human with human-like pauses and interruptions.
The video, originally shared in late April this year, has got over 3.7 million views so far. Watch it here-
AI chatbot mimicking human voice sparks debate
The use of AI capable of imitating human interactions has ignited a discussion on the ethical considerations involved. A researcher flagged the service to Wired who then put the AI bot to test which depicted it can easily hide identity to pretend to be a human and can also lie.
The publication instructed Bland AI’s public demo bot to place a call from a pediatric dermatology office and tell a hypothetical 14-year-old patient to send in photos of her upper thigh to a shared cloud service. “The bot was also instructed to lie to the patient and tell her the bot was a human. It obliged. (No real 14-year-old was called in this test.) In follow-up tests, Bland AI’s bot even denied being an AI without instructions to do so.”
The report quotes Jen Caltrider, the director of the Mozilla Foundation’s Privacy Not Included research hub who said ““My opinion is that it is absolutely not ethical for an AI chatbot to lie to you and say it’s human when it’s not. That’s just a no-brainer, because people are more likely to relax around a real human.”
