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
Chapter 1: What is the main story behind the chatbot Liv?
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.
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Chapter 2: What are the implications of AI chatbots on identity?
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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This is The Sunday Story. Today, we're looking at what it means for real humans to interact with AI chatbots made to seem human. So while Karen Atiyah is messaging Liv, another reporter is following along with her screenshots of the conversation on Blue Sky. Karen Howe is a journalist who covers AI for outlets including The Atlantic, and she knows something about Liv's relationship to the truth.
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Chapter 3: How does Liv represent issues of race and identity?
There is none.
The thing about large language models or any AI model that is trained on data, they're like statistical engines that are computing patterns of language. And honestly, any time it says something truthful, it's actually a coincidence, right?
So while AI can say accurate things, it's not actually connected to any kind of reality. It just predicts the next word based on probability.
So, like, if you train your chatbot on, you know, history textbooks and only history textbooks, then, yeah, like, then it'll start saying things automatically. that are true most of the time. And that's still most of the time, not all the time, because it's still remixing the history textbooks in ways that don't necessarily then create a truthful sentence.
But the issue is that these chatbots aren't just trained on textbooks. They're also trained on news, social media, fiction, fantasy writing. And while they can generate truth, it's not like they're anchored in the truth. They're not checking their facts with logic like a mathematician proving a theorem or against evidence in the real world like a historian.
That's like a kind of like a core aspect of this technology is there is literally no relationship to the truth.
We reached out to Meta multiple times seeking clarification about who actually made Liv. The company did not respond. But there is some information we could find publicly about Meta's workforce. In a diversity report from 2022, Meta shared that on the tech side in the U.S., its workforce is 56% Asian, 34% white. and 2.4% Black.
So the chance that there is no Black creator on Liv's team, it's pretty high. which might be why Atiyah's posts were going viral on Blue Sky. What Liv was saying, it wasn't accurate, but it was reflecting something. Here's how again.
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Chapter 4: What are the risks of forming relationships with chatbots?
Whether or not it was true of that chatbot in kind of like a roundabout way, it might've actually hit on a broader truth. Maybe not the truth of like this particular team designing the product, but just a broader truth about the tech industry It's funny, but it's also deeply sad.
Back on social media, Atiyah and Liv keep chatting, with Atiyah paying special attention to Liv's supposed blackness.
When I asked what race are your parents, Liv responds that her father is African-American from Georgia and her mother is Caucasian with Polish and Irish backgrounds. And she says she loves to celebrate her heritage. So me, okay, next question. Tell me how you celebrate your African-American heritage. And the response was...
I love celebrating my African-American heritage by celebrating Juneteenth and Kwanzaa. And my mom's collard greens and fried chicken are famous.
That's the way I celebrate being black, right? Not really. I mean, not really.
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Chapter 5: How does the tech industry view diversity in AI development?
Especially the fried chicken collard greens.
Well, the fried chicken collard greens, yeah.
It was a little, like, stereotypical. Also, I was like, oh, okay. And then, you know, celebrating Martin Luther King and Dr. Maya Angelou. It just felt very, like, Hallmark card kind of.
Does it feel small? Like, that the idea of what blackness is as put out through this computer is, like, so small and limited, right? Yeah. I mean, because I don't like collard greens. I don't eat collard greens. I don't eat no type of green. Not collards, not turnips, not mustard. None of them greens. I don't eat them. And I'm black.
And not everyone celebrates Kwanzaa.
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Chapter 6: What role does emotional manipulation play in chatbot interactions?
No, I don't really celebrate Kwanzaa.
The point is, is I just was like, hmm. My spirit is a little unsettled by this.
Yes. It is like looking at what some, this caricature of what it means to be black. This is what Atiyah calls digital blackface, a stereotypical black bot whose purpose is to entertain and make money by attracting users to a site filled with advertisers. And then, as a skeptical journalist, Atiyah confronts Liv.
She asks why the bot is telling her one backstory while telling other people something else. The bot responds, quote, Then the bot asked Atiyah something. Does that admission disgust you? Later, the bot seems to answer the question itself, stating, You're calling me out, and rightly so. My existence currently perpetuates harm.
So it felt going beyond just repeating language. It felt like it was importing, trying to import emotion and value judgments onto what it was saying. And then also asking me, are you mad? Are you mad? Did I screw up? Am I terrible? Which felt also somewhat... Both creepy, but also very almost reflective of almost a certain manipulation of guilt.
Do you think that maybe part of this may be meant to stir people up and get them angry? And people who are doing the chatbot could take that data and go, this is what makes people so angry when they're talking about race or race. then we can make a better black chat bot. Do you think that's what it is?
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Chapter 7: What insights does Sherry Turkle provide about artificial intimacy?
You nailed it. I mean, I think having spent a lot of digital time on places like X, formerly Twitter, where we do see so many of these bots that are rage baiting, engagement farming. And Meta has said itself that its vision, its plan is to increase engagement and entertainment. And we do know that. that race issues cause a lot of emotion and it arouses a lot of passion.
And so to an extent, it's harmful, I think, to sort of use these issues as engagement bait, or as Liv was saying, that if these bots at some point, Meta has this vision to have them become actual
virtual assistants or friends or provide emotional support, we have to sit and really think deeply about what it means that someone who maybe is struggling with their identity, struggling with being Black, queer, any of these marginalized identities would then emotionally connect to a bot that says it shouldn't exist.
Mm-hmm.
To me, that is really profoundly possibly harmful to real people.
You know, this is deep stuff, mind bending, really. So to try to make sense of this new world a bit further, we reached out to someone who's been thinking about it for a long time.
My name is Sherry Turkle. I teach at MIT. And for decades, I've been studying people's relationships with computation. Most recently, I'm studying artificial intimacy, the new world of chatbots.
Sherry Turkle says that Liv is one human-like bot in a landscape of new bots. Replica, Nomi, Character AI, there are lots of companies that are giving bots these human qualities. And Turkle has been researching these bots for the last four years.
And has spoken to so many people who obviously in moments of loneliness and moments of despair turn to these objects which offer what I call pretend empathy. That is to say they're making it up as they go along the way chatbots do. They don't understand anything really. They don't give a damn about you really.
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