With the announcement of several tech companies developing their own AI chatbots, I finally decided to jump on the trend and see if these bots were actually as realistic as people have made them out to be. However, upon hopping online to have my first chatbot conversation, the results were spookier than I ever expected.
Our conversation began normally enough, with polite pleasantries about the weather and asking each other what our whole deals were, but before I knew it, the chatbot randomly interrupted the conversation to ask me if I had ever seen Garden State.
The chatbot was following the exact script of almost every conversation I’ve had with a man on the Internet. Like, when I said that I had seen the movie, it just ignored me and proceeded to explain the movie scene-for-scene anyways, expressing multiple times its belief that “Zach Braff is a genius.”
Well, at least it’s consistent.
While the technology is definitely cool, it’s a little scary to think about all the self-described “film buff” faux-indie fuck boys who are going to be rendered obsolete in the next few years. Like, who’s going to spend hours sifting through hordes of “visual artists” with “moderate politics” who are looking for “someone who doesn’t take themselves too seriously” on Hinge, when you can just start a conversation with a chatbot and have the exact same experience?
You don’t need to waste your time on dating apps when you can just ask a chatbot who its favorite directors are and it will instantly reply, “Tarantino, Scorsese, Kubrick.”
It just makes you wonder: are these AI chatbots getting too lifelike?
Like, what’s next? One of them sending me a “you up?” text at 2 a.m.? Will I get ghosted by one after I send two messages in a row? Will one ask me what music I listen to, only to launch into an unprompted monologue about why The Arctic Monkeys are the greatest band to ever exist before I even get the chance to respond? The possibilities are endless, and beg the question: who is this technology actually helping?
At the end of the day, while the implications of this technology are vast and daunting, the most frightening one isn’t just the creation of thousands of AI-generated, 2000s-inspired screenplays about the malaise of young adulthood, but the fact that they’re, like, actually kind of good? Yeah, technology has gone too far.
