The Exchanges

Q Oh yeah. Alright, I'm just full disclosure for everybody out there. Um, so let's talk a little bit about the uses. Um, for this, the first thing that really stood out to me was that you had your voice, uh, your AI voice start speaking to robocalling scammers. Why did you pick them and how did that go?

A Well, it started because when I was testing my agent at, at the beginning, I would have a call customer service lines like United Airlines or Chase Bank and just kind of come up with problems and try to have them solve the problems. But it was a little bit prank call-y In a way, and I kind of felt bad. So I did a little bit of that, but then I thought, well, who was something, someone I wouldn't feel bad about this thing just conversing with? And so I set up this phone line, and I kind of seeded it out in the world, which isn't very hard, to start getting telemarketing calls, to start getting scam calls. It actually, to this day, it's probably getting a scam call right now. It gets 30, 40 a day right now.

AI assessment note: “who was something, someone I wouldn't feel bad about this thing just conversing with?”

Q so interesting that, um, you decided to then extend beyond that. To me, I, I was like, when I initially heard of your podcast, I was like, oh, Evan is sending his voice agent to scam scammers. That's great. And that's a show. But then you progress beyond that and you got really weird, um, especially sending the bot to therapy. So why did you send the bot to therapy?

A Well, it was partly because, you know, with a particular with AI, but this has happened, as you know, with many technology products over the years, the thing that the companies who are putting these products on the market will tell you is the more information you give it, the more useful it will be. So if you're going to have an AI agent, You need to give it all this information about yourself so it knows you, so it can do things for you. That is going to be the thing you're going to hear nonstop over the coming years. And so I thought, okay, well, why don't I do that? Why don't I give it all this information about myself, my mental health history, my life story, basically, and see what happens if I send it to therapists, like what, what problems will it surface? What answers will it get? And then I thought, well, first I'll send it to an AI therapist because What a perfect match. Like, my voice agent AI sitting there talking to these AI therapists, which are on the market right now. You can call them up. You can get AI therapy from an AI from a chat bot.

AI assessment note: “see what happens if I send it to therapists, like what, what problems will it surface?”

Q So talk a little bit about why people would, they just thought it was cool or what was it?

A I think some people, Thought it was cool, and, and I think they saw some humor in it initially. So I think the people who responded best, they kind of thought, This is something you're, I mean, they're used to me doing strange stories over the years, and so they might think, well, he's doing something weird, this sounds like an AI, but also, like, this must be a joke. And I think if that was the frame of mind they were in, then they, they, a couple of them loved talking to it, because of course they loved, you know, trying to egg it on to say this, that, or the other, and you can hear them, you can hear the kind of excitement in their voice, including my friend Chris, who's a lawyer, who, I sent it with actual legal questions about the show, And he answered them very succinctly. In fact, probably better than he would have answered them if I had called him myself. So it was useful in that sense. But those were the people who really kind of embraced, like, oh, I'm talking to an AI. Like, this is a new experience. I want to, I want to see this through.

AI assessment note: “I think some people, Thought it was cool, and, and I think they saw some humor”

Q could be walking around talking on like a headset, but on zoom, it will just be a, your avatar talking and looking lifelike. It really looks lifelike. And why are we not just a step away from somebody sending their AI out in work? So what do you think about that use case? And what, what should we be concerned about that? Or what, how should we feel about that?

A I feel like that use case, to me, it comes with a lot of the issues that a lot of AI products to me come with, which is that they, the, the, the people who have designed them generally have one set of problems that do not apply to most humans on the face of this earth. So yes, the Zoom CEO would not like to be in meetings. The Zoom CEO would like to send a digital twin to meetings In his stead. Great. Nobody wants to be in meetings. Most people do not want to be in meetings. So do the other people get to send theirs or just the CEO? And then the question is, if everyone sends their agents to meetings, who's going to process all the information? Like, they're going to distill it for you. Like, what's the purpose of the meeting? What is the purpose of the work? Like, I feel like those things all get lost in these discussions. And what ends up happening is super busy CEOs and very wealthy people come up with solutions for them, and you kind of wonder, like, well, what happens with the rest of us? And so, I feel like that stuff is right around the corner. I know people who have gone to job interviews, to meetings, where they encounter an AI when they do not expect to encounter an AI, and I think we're gonna see more and more of that in the next months, years.

AI assessment note: “I feel like that use case, to me, it comes with a lot of the issues”

Q are you on the question of AI sentience? I mean, you basically created an AI to resemble a person. I know we don't think, or at least I don't think you I believe that AIs are sentient now, but do you, did you feel any, like, say in AI world, uh, feel the AGI at all, or did you feel any hints of, um, personhood and AI that you developed?

A I did not. In fact, the more that I deployed it, the less I felt that. Now, I, I think when we're talking about how close is AGI and those types of questions, I think the people inside the companies Who are extremely closed about what's going on. Um, they're dealing with non-guard railed versions of the chatbots. So I think they may have different experiences and they write about, you know, as you talked about in a recent show, like, the chatbot's lying and things like that. In this case, you've got the fully guard railed, you know, chat GPT, latest version. The more that you talk to it, the more generic it feels to you. The more you can actually feel The training data, the, the sort of, like, distilling down the training data and the predictive aspect. Like, oh, it's trying to predict what a human would say in this given moment, and what the average human would say in this given moment is actually quite lame. Like, that's what you really figure out. So, I felt further away from that the more that I, like, spent time with it. Now, I don't think that's necessarily, like, a statement about how close or far away it is, because I think those aspects are all internal to these companies, and, like, we just don't have access to them.

AI assessment note: “I did not. In fact, the more that I deployed it, the less I felt that.”

Q So why don't you take us down the road a little bit. I mean, what do you think is going to happen as this technology gets better?

A I think, uh, first of all, as with many things, the market is going to dictate that people are going to use this technology, even if it remains flawed, even if it remains not quite human quality, uh, for all sorts of, I mean, the very obvious ones are like telemarketing, call centers, uh, ordering food at a drive through, you know, places where they can save a little bit of money by deploying it, even if it messes up sometimes, even if it does crazy stuff, like give you the wrong order, like, They'll just say, well, humans mess up too, and it messes up less. And so I think we're going to start to see them infiltrate these different parts of society. And I think the question is going to be how people respond to them. And if people are sort of like, eh, it's same, same to me, or maybe this customer service AI is actually more helpful than the person that I get sometimes when I call the social security administration or the VA or whatever benefits I need, maybe people will embrace them. I think you have seen some instances with technology where like, With, you know, for instance, check out, checking yourself out of the grocery store where a lot of people don't like it, and then maybe they go back to humans. So I think it's still, the balance still is yet to be determined, but I think there is no question that voice AI agents are just going to be, they're just going to be deployed …

AI assessment note: “we're going to start to see them infiltrate these different parts of society.”