alt Hacker NewsHow would talking to an AI as if it were not human sound? You can probably set your system prompt to insert “beep boop” between sentences and make it refer to itself as “Cybertron9000 Personal Computing Device” if that’s what you like. Is that an improvement? Or are you against voice computer interfaces altogether?
Replies
I don't know the answer. But a robotic voice is probably not a bad idea — just having a reminder that the thing you're talking to is not actually anything like you. If you want to go full send, you could have the LLM generate a clickable interface on demand so you could interact with it as a machine. Voice/computer interfaces are obviously useful, especially for disabled folks. But the ones that existed in the past didn't pretend to laugh at your non jokes or imitate vocal fry.
The Star Trek computer doesn't feel uncannily human, that would be a good starting point.
My preference would be to turn down the fake emotional expressions and notes in the responses. No cheeky quips, etc.
Otherwise it's kind of like being manipulated by a psychopath
I think you could make it impersonal sounding. Like, right now ChatGPT throws in a lot of cheeky things. They don't really bother me because I don't anthropomorphize it, but, a lot of otherwise smart people are struggling with anthropomorphizing these things right now (Richard Dawkins..) so it strikes me that the less personality they have the better. (If you want personality just throw it into the prompt, ya know?) To their credit I think this is customizable in ChatGPT right now (it's been a while since I looked), but "impersonal" should probably be the default until society adjusts to these things.