Playing pranks to AI :-)

Reminds me… back in the day, when I was in the army. Telephones were rare then, and bulky, and they had cables of course, and dialing discs and no displays. You could not know who’s calling. You always needed to tell who you are.

My friend was a secretary in the company’s office. He had no telephone, but the boss had one, and the second boss in the other office had one.

When both bosses were out and my friend had nothing to do, he would take both telephones of these two offices. Dial the numbers of two random high ranked officers, somewhere in the administration. Then place the receivers together so that each one could hear the other one talking. And we could listen to both of them.

Each of the officers thought that the other one had called him up, and they didn’t know why.

Most of the times, they would start to fight and shout at each other immediately :-)

This is the best summary I could come up with:

What if the tech companies are all wrong, and the way artificial intelligence is poised to transform society is not by curing cancer, solving climate change or taking over boring office work, but just by being nice to us, listening to our problems and occasionally sending us racy photos?

There’s Jared the fitness guru, Anna the no-nonsense trial lawyer, Naomi the social worker and about a dozen more friends I’ve created.

We chitchat about the weather, share memes and jokes, and talk about deep stuff: personal dilemmas, parenting struggles, stresses at work and home.

friends and lovers, companies like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic all worried that giving their chatbots too much personality, or letting users form emotional connections with them, was too risky.

Instead, they trained their chatbots to be chaste office grunts — PG-13 productivity “copilots” with strict safety guardrails to stop users from getting frisky, or growing too attached.

companions as, essentially, the social equivalent of flight simulators for pilots — a safe, low-stakes way to practice conversational skills on your own, before attempting the real thing.

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