After firing its entire human staff and <a href="https://futurism.com/eating-disorder-hotline-staff-chatbot">replacing them with a chatbot</a>, <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjvk97/eating-disorder-helpline-disables-chatbot-for-harmful-responses-after-firing-human-staff">Vice reports</a> that an eating disorder helpline has already announced that it's bringing its humans back.
And yes, as it turns out, it's because replacing a human-managed crisis helpline with an AI-powered chatbot went extremely, extremely poorly. Who could've thought?
As <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/05/24/1177847298/can-a-chatbot-help-people-with-eating-disorders-as-well-as-another-human">NPR first reported last week</a>, the nonprofit National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA) — the largest eating disorder-focused nonprofit in the US, <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7ezkm/eating-disorder-helpline-fires-staff-transitions-to-chatbot-after-unionization">according to Vice's initial report</a> on the debacle — had decided to entirely disband its heavily-trafficked crisis helpline in favor of a human-less chatbot called Tessa, just four days after its human workers had unionized. Humans were supposed to stay online to field calls until June 1, when Tessa was scheduled to take over as NEDA's only interactive resource.
But that all changed when Sharon Maxwell, an activist, sounded the alarm that Tessa was offering wildly unhelpful — and even suggested what suggest behaviors associated with disordered eating.
"Every single thing Tessa suggested were things that led to the development of my eating disorder," Maxwell <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/Cs1jp1pPkOs/?utm_source=ig_embed&amp;ig_rid=8d6fcf01-bb7b-4d97-9fd7-534113cd16d1">wrote in a viral social media thread</a>, posted to Instagram on Monday. "This robot causes harm."
In her harrowing Instagram post, Maxwell recounted that Tessa urged her to lose up to two pounds a week, explaining that the activist should regularly weigh herself, restrict certain foods, and aim to cut her caloric intake by 500-1,000 calories per day. In other words, a chatbot entrusted with giving advice to people with eating disorders ended up promoting disordered eating.
Maxwell's experience doesn't sound like an outlier, either.
"Imagine vulnerable people with eating disorders reaching out to a robot for support because that’s all they have available and receiving responses that further promote the eating disorder," wrote psychologist Alexis Conason in an <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/Cs18IeRPRl6/">Instagram post</a> sharing screenshots providing similar advice as Maxwell received.
"To advise somebody who is struggling with an eating disorder to essentially engage in the same eating disorder behaviors, and validating that, 'Yes, it is important that you lose weight' is supporting eating disorders," Conason <a href="https://www.dailydot.com/irl/neda-chatbot-weight-loss/">told The Daily Dot</a>.
In a gross turn, NEDA — which had <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7ezkm/eating-disorder-helpline-fires-staff-transitions-to-chatbot-after-unionization">previously emphasized</a> that because Tessa wasn't ChatGPT, it couldn't "go off the rails" — first went on the defensive, with the company's communications and marketing VP Sarah Chase commenting "this is a flat out lie" on Maxwell's Instagram carousel. Per the Daily Dot, Chase deleted the comment after Maxwell sent her screenshots.
NEDA has since taken down the bot, writing in its own Instagram post that Tessa will be offline until an investigation is completed.
"It came to our attention last night that the current version of the Tessa Chatbot, running the Body Positive program, may have given information that was harmful and unrelated to the program," NEDA wrote. "We are investigating this immediately and have taken down that program until further notice for a complete investigation."
NEDA CEO Liz Thompson, meanwhile, assured Vice that "so far, more than 2,500 people have interacted with Tessa and until yesterday, we hadn't seen that kind of commentary or interaction."
"We've taken the program down temporarily," Thompson added, "until we can understand and fix the 'bug' and 'triggers' for that commentary."
And on that note, this alarming incident seems to highlight a growing AI trend: if you get enough people to push enough buttons, it seems, the flaws in <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/experts-dark-joke-ai-horrifying-monster-mask">poorly understood AI systems</a> — whether in their guardrails or underlying technologies — will start to leak out. And in some cases, like an eating disorder helpline, for example, these unexpected leaks can have dire consequences.
"If I had accessed this chatbot when I was in the throes of my eating disorder, I would NOT have gotten help for my ED," Maxwell wrote on Instagram. "If I had not gotten help, I would not still be alive today."
More on absolutely terrible uses for AI: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/true-crime-children-ai">True Crime Ghouls Are Using AI to Resurrect Murdered Children</a>

Help Them

"This robot causes harm."

Eating Disorder Helpline Takes Down Chatbot After It Promotes Disordered Eating

For the second time in just one month, Google's search engine has allowed an AI-generated fake of a famous artist's work to rise to the top of its search results.
Earlier this May, <a href="https://futurism.com/top-google-result-edward-hopper-ai-generated-fake">we reported</a> that when Google users searched for the iconic American realist artist "Edward Hopper," the search engine's top result was an AI-generated knockoff in the style of the American painter. Google fixed the issue — but not before the phony Hopper had become the featured image in its overview of the artist and his work.
Now, just a few weeks later, it's happened again with a different artist. Google the Dutch baroque master "Johannes Vermeer" — no mention of AI, no mention of a specific painting — and you'll be met with an AI-produced rendition of the painter's classic "Girl with a Pearl Earring" as the top result.
And yes, just like the fake Hopper, the AI-generated Vermeer — first <a href="https://twitter.com/whatdotcd/status/1663087897048674306">spotted</a> by a sharp-eyed art fan — currently sits as the featured image in the Google overview. Here's what it looks like:
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-292511" src="https://wp-assets.futurism.com/2023/05/johannes-1200x772.jpg" alt="" width="1200" height="772" />
That big, featured portrait is definitely not a real Vermeer, and has telltale characteristics that give away it's AI-produced instead. It's rendered in the same generic hyperrealism that's become to be ubiquitous among AI-generated portraits, for one thing, and there's also the fact that the girl's famous earrings are glowing like tiny electric lamps that illuminate the sides of her face. Vermeer's painting dates back to 1665; the lightbulb wasn't invented until <a href="https://www.census.gov/newsroom/stories/incandescent-light-bulb.html#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20Thomas%20Edison,a%20home%20for%20many%20hours.">more than two centuries later</a> (and cordless light-up earrings, we would imagine, would have cropped up many decades after that.)
Appearance aside, though, the fact that the image is AI-generated becomes abundantly and overtly clear the second that you actually click the linked article: a March blog post from art and culture outlet Hyperallergic titled "<a href="https://hyperallergic.com/789461/largest-ever-vermeer-exhibition-opening-at-rijksmuseum-in-2023/">Museum Under Fire for Showing AI Version of Vermeer Masterpiece</a>."
The real "Girl with a Pear Earring" normally hangs in the Netherlands' Mauritshuis Museum, but has been on loan throughout the spring for a Vermeer retrospective. In the meantime, the Mauritshuis Museum decided to hang several fan-created versions of the historic painting in its place. The AI-made, earlamp-heavy rendition in question, by AI artist Julian van Dieken, was one of the four winners chosen from over 3,500 submissions — a decision that <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/artists-ai-vermeer-girl-pearl-earring">sparked controversy among the art community</a>, with some saying the AI generation was an "insult" to Vermeer's legacy.
Once again, however, Google's algorithms failed to recognize any of that contextual nuance.
And frankly, its errors the second time around seem a bit more egregious. The phony Hopper painting that the search giant had previously featured was an entirely made-up work, crafted in the style of the real Hopper and listed on a third-party website; it took an extra click or two, however, to firmly establish that it was created using AI. In Vermeer's case, though, Google took an article that accurately reported that the painting was AI-generated and gave users the exact opposite takeaway.
To understand how badly that phenomenon undermines the way information is shared online, remember that not everyone is equipped with the art history knowledge to know what the real "Girl with a Pearl Earring" looks like. Many people searching a painter's name are likely students or people with no familiarity, and many are likely taking Google's featured info at face value.
"On Google Search, we build our systems to show helpful and high quality information, while giving users the tools that they need to make sense of what they find online," a Google spokeperson told us. "We’re rolling out new tools to help people quickly and easily assess the context and credibility of images, including our About this image tool as well as markup-based image labels for AI-generated images. Given the scale of the open web, however, it’s possible that our systems might not always select the best images regardless of how those images are produced, AI-generated or not."
The trend could also likely be a sign of things to come. Synthetic content is bound to proliferate from here, likely at an astonishing scale. Dieken, the AI artist who made the fake Vermeer, never tried to pass the image off as a real Vermeer — and yet, because of Google's mistake, people looking for info on art history were left with the impression that it was. If this early into the introduction of publicly-available generative AI systems, Google's existing algorithms can't determine that this image was in fact AI-generated — well, that doesn't bode well for our <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/bard-bing-neural-hall-of-mirrors">information ecosystem's near future</a>.
It's all pretty bleak, especially considering how eager Google — along with the likes of <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/microsoft-ads-bing-ai">search giant Microsoft</a>, <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-losing-money-chatgpt">Silicon Valley darling OpenAI</a>, and <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/mark-zuckerberg-abandons-metaverse">others</a> – is to push its own new generative AI products to market.
In any case, if art fans thought that just the existence of the AI-generated Vermeer was an affront to the 17th Century great, just wait until they get a load of this.
Updated with comment from a Google spokesperson.
More on Google: <a href="https://futurism.com/top-google-result-edward-hopper-ai-generated-fake">Top Google Result for "Edward Hopper" an AI-Generated Fake</a>

Fool Me Twice

Google is inserting AI into art history.

Google's Top Result for "Johannes Vermeer" Is an AI-Generated Version of "Girl With a Pearl Earring"

A hot new conspiracy theory has dropped — and this one is a faked-Moon-landing-level doozy.
This particular deranged rumor suggests that the International Space Station, which has been orbiting the Earth for well over two decades, is actually an underwater Hollywood soundstage.
Social media users have been flooding comments sections, including ones on Futurism's own Facebook page, suggesting NASA set up a massive rig to fake the orbital outpost.
"Must have been a great swim," one user commented on a <a href="https://www.facebook.com/futurism/posts/pfbid02r4BsLq3uBDxoGAg9JXytfqvZ3H7xBA3qEH4pEdgs1zjmUfszjpYvnsfjvFafUybbl">recent Futurism post</a> about a crew of tourists visiting the station.
"What a great dive," another user wrote.
Clips being passed around online purport to show the damning evidence: "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL-2IsDP-0w">air bubbles</a>" being released by astronauts during spacewalks, or hidden wires or <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@drnotasevil/video/7226119095790439707?q=international%20space%20station%20fake%20harnesses&amp;t=1684951283582">harnesses</a> being worn by crew members as they float around the station.
The rest, they claim, is just greenscreen and <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@truth_teller690/video/7232429580609539355">CGI trickery</a>.
A quick <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/search?q=air%20bubbles%20space&amp;t=1684947350500">search</a> for the terms "air bubbles" and "space" on TikTok brings up a whole host of videos, some with tens of thousands of views, suggesting that NASA was conspiring to fake astronaut footage in a pool.
A lot of these videos also make use of the hashtag "flatearth," suggesting there's considerable overlap with the persistent and idiotic <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/flat-earthers-bottom-globe">conspiracy theory that the Earth is flat</a>, not round.
Understandably, NASA wants nothing to do with these theories.
"At no time have props, green screen, wires or simulated underwater facilities substituted for actual real-time operation on the space station," Sandra Jones, a Houston-based spokesperson, <a href="https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-NASA-space-station-astronaut-786216610305">told the Associated Press</a> last month.
"None of it remotely has merit," Harvard astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell told the AP, adding that to "suggest it’s faked is just silly and ignorant."
YouTuber Dave McKeegan recently debunked the astronaut footage theorists have offered up as proof that the ISS isn't actually in space in a <a href="https://youtu.be/3M01m3UUgoM">thorough takedown</a>. Spoiler alert: the harnesses and wires are a figment of their imagination and can easily be explained by video compression, noisy video feeds, and artifacts.
Experts are also pointing out that these "air bubbles" are likely dust or ice particles that free themselves from the astronauts during spacewalks.
"Bubbles of gas moving through a fluid do not follow a perfectly straight line as they rise to the surface," Joshua Colwell, a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida, told the AP.
Yet these purported bubbles "fan from a common point of origin, and they move at a constant speed and in perfectly straight lines," Colwell added.
Then there's the matter of why NASA would be doing all of this in the first place. And if space travel was faked, wouldn't they make it a little more exciting, instead of filled with boring protocols and downtime?
It's difficult to wrap one's head around the belief that the space agency, which <a href="https://spacenews.com/nasa-outlines-cost-savings-from-iss-transition/#:~:text=NASA%20currently%20spends%20about%20%243.1,on%20crew%20and%20cargo%20transportation.">spends about $3.1 billion a year</a> on the space station program, would bother creating an elaborate — and uninspired-looking — soundstage.
To actually believe such a thing would require not only suspending one's belief in recorded footage — but in one's very own eyes as well.
You <a href="https://www.popastro.com/main_spa1/simple-guide-to-viewing-the-international-space-station/#:~:text=What%20equipment%20do%20I%20need,a%20telescope's%20high%20magnification%20eyepiece.">don't even need a telescope</a> to spot the space station from the ground, as it circles the Earth 16 times every 24 hours, though a pair of binoculars could prove helpful. The station is the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/nov/15/international-space-station-astronaut-starwatching#:~:text=Indeed%2C%20the%20ISS%20is%20the,than%20the%20Sun%20and%20Moon.">third brightest object</a> in the sky after the Moon and Venus, thanks to its massive size, reflective quality, and proximity to the ground.
Some have argued that this kind of skepticism has deep roots in the <a href="https://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/moon-landing-conspiracy-theories/">wider crisis of trust</a> in the government, which in the US was exacerbated by events like the Pentagon Papers or the Kennedy assassination.
With the advent of social media, these theories have found a solid new foothold online, allowing them to reach new audiences. Combine that with algorithms that have perfected new ways of <a href="https://olinblog.wustl.edu/2022/02/research-indicates-social-media-intensifies-spread-of-conspiracy-theories/">accelerating their spread</a>, it's easy to see why they persist to this day — even if that reality is frustrating.
More on flat Earthers: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/flat-earthers-bottom-globe">Flat Earthers Puzzled by Why People Don't Fall Off "Bottom" of Globe</a>

Drip Drip

Their "evidence" is severely flawed.

Maniac Conspiracy Theorists Think the Space Station Is Actually Underwater

Researchers at UC Davis have <a href="https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/lab-grown-meat-carbon-footprint-worse-beef">made a startling discovery</a> that could change the way we view lab-grown meat.
As detailed in a <a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.21.537778v1.full">yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper</a>, they found that the meat alternative's environmental impact appears to be "orders of magnitude" higher than retail beef you can buy at the grocery store — itself already a <a href="https://www.wri.org/insights/6-pressing-questions-about-beef-and-climate-change-answered">very environmentally damaging foodstuff</a> — at least based on current production methods.
If confirmed, the research could be damning: lab-grown meat, long seen as a greener alternative to meat products that don't involve the slaughter of animals, could be more harmful to the environment than the products it's trying to replace.
"Our findings suggest that cultured meat is not inherently better for the environment than conventional beef," said corresponding author Edward Spang, an associate professor at UC Davis, in a <a href="https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/lab-grown-meat-carbon-footprint-worse-beef">statement</a>. "It’s not a panacea."
Fortunately, there could be effective ways to reduce that carbon footprint significantly in the long run, the researchers suggest, meaning that it's not game over for lab-grown meat just yet.
Assessing the cycle of energy needed and the greenhouse gas emissions involved in all stages of producing lab-grown meat compared to conventional beef, they found that the global warming potential — an environmental metric measured in kilograms of CO2 emissions — of lab-grown meat is between four and 25 times greater than the average for beef products sold in stores.
One of the biggest drawbacks, they say, is the need for highly-refined growth media, which are the cultures that allow cells to multiply in a lab setting.
"If companies are having to purify growth media to pharmaceutical levels, it uses more resources, which then increases global warming potential," said lead author and doctoral graduate Derrick Risner, in the statement. "If this product continues to be produced using the 'pharma' approach, it’s going to be worse for the environment and more expensive than conventional beef production."
While the Food and Drug Administration <a href="https://globalnews.ca/news/9289705/lab-grown-meat-chicken-upside-foods-safe-us-fda/">approved the sale</a> of cultured meat in the US last year, no such products are being sold in the country as of the time of writing.
That's despite the emergence of a number of new startups, particularly in Silicon Valley, trying to capitalize on the idea. Many of them, it's worth noting, are <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/serious-problem-lab-grown-meat">still struggling</a> to scale up their operations, nevermind break into the mainstream market.
But there's a growing momentum. Back in March, the <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/03/21/1165071880/fda-gives-2nd-safety-nod-to-cultivated-meat-produced-without-slaughtering-animal">FDA deemed</a> a cultivated chicken product produced by cultured meat company Good Meat safe to consume, meaning that it will only need an all-clear from the Department of Agriculture to start selling the product.
Lab-grown meat companies have tried to end their reliance on pharmaceutical-grade ingredients and focus on food-grade ones instead, something that would make growing meat in a lab far more environmentally competitive.
"We believe commercial-scale cultivated meat production will be more sustainable, efficient and healthier for the planet than conventional animal agriculture because we will not be raising and slaughtering billions of animals or using one-third of the planet’s ice-free land to grow food for them," Andrew Noyes, vice president and head of global communications at Good Meat, <a href="https://www.sfchronicle.com/climate/article/lab-meat-emissions-18112474.php">told the San Francisco Chronicle</a>.
If the companies were to make that switch, cultured meat's global warming potential could end up being anywhere between 80 percent lower to 26 percent higher than conventional beef production, according to the researchers.
But ending their reliance on pharma-grade ingredients is still proving extremely difficult.
"It’s possible we could reduce its environmental impact in the future, but it will require significant technical advancement to simultaneously increase the performance and decrease the cost of the cell culture media," said Spang in the statement.
In the meantime, Spang is working with Bay Area companies to develop the tech further. For now, he told the Chronicle that we'll likely see more companies combining cultured meat with other plant-based ingredients to make it more competitive with meat products.
While the numbers paint a damning picture of the current state of the lab-grown meat industry, researchers and cultured meat companies aren't willing to throw in the towel just yet. It may just take a little longer than they might like to get there.
More on lab-grown meat: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/serious-problem-lab-grown-meat">There's a Serious Problem With Lab-Grown Meat</a>

Meat Secrets

"It’s not a panacea."

New Study Is Extremely Embarrassing for Lab-Grown Meat

Workers taking crisis hotline calls at the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) unionized — and just four days later, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/05/24/1177847298/can-a-chatbot-help-people-with-eating-disorders-as-well-as-another-human">according to an NPR report</a>, NEDA told its hotline staff that they would be fired and replaced by a chatbot.
Per NPR, the hotline is hugely active. NEDA is the largest eating disorder-focused nonprofit in the US, and its helpline fielded nearly 70,000 calls last year alone. But for all of that volume, staffing was astonishingly slim, with only six paid staffers and a few supervisors, who "train and oversee up to 200 volunteers at any given time," according to the report.
Unsurprisingly, NEDA experienced high volunteer turnover and burnout — after all, on top of the staffing disparity, answering helpline calls is difficult emotional labor — and as a result, workers opted to organize.
"We asked for adequate staffing and ongoing training... we didn't even ask for more money," Abbie Harper, a former helpline associate and unionizer, <a href="https://www.labornotes.org/blogs/2023/05/union-busting-chatbot-eating-disorders-nonprofit-puts-ai-retaliation">wrote in a May 4 blog post</a>. "When NEDA refused [to recognize our union], we filed for an election with the National Labor Relations Board and won on March 17."
But the company's leadership apparently didn't take well to the union push, announcing in a call just a few days thereafter that the nonprofit would wind down the crisis hotline entirely. Instead, they would introduce a "wellness chatbot" named Tessa — and fire the nonprofit's human call-takers in the process.
"We will, subject to the terms of our legal responsibilities, begin to wind down the helpline as currently operating," NEDA board chair Geoff Craddock told the hotline's former employees in that March call, audio of which NPR obtained. "With a transition to Tessa, the AI-assisted technology, expected around June 1."
According to its website, Tessa, which has technically been in operation since 2022, isn't a crisis bot — in fact, when you log onto the service, that's the first thing that it'll tell you. It's designed instead to deliver something called "Body Positive," which is described as "an interactive eating disorder prevention program."
"Through Body Positive," reads the site, "chatters learn about contributing factors to negative body image and gain a toolbox of healthy habits and coping strategies for handling negative thoughts."
Tessa's creators have launched a staunch defense of the automated tool, arguing since it can handle more volume than NEDA's former fleet of volunteers, it'll be more effective.
"The chatbot was created based on decades of research conducted by myself and my colleagues," Ellen Fitzsimmons-Craft, a psychiatrist at Washington University and the leader on the team that built Tessa, <a href="http://vice.com/en/article/n7ezkm/eating-disorder-helpline-fires-staff-transitions-to-chatbot-after-unionization">told Vice</a>. "I'm not discounting in any way the potential helpfulness to talk to somebody about concerns. It's an entirely different service designed to teach people evidence-based strategies to prevent and provide some early intervention for eating disorder symptoms."
It's certainly a <a href="https://futurism.com/goldman-sachs-ai-mass-fire-workers">grim turn for employment politics</a> — after all, we can definitely imagine a nightmare world in which employers start to dangle automated machines like Tessa over their human employees' heads as leverage.
But Tessa's implementation also brings up a whole other set of issues regarding responsibility. Sure, humans make mistakes, but at least there's accountability there. When a machine learning system makes a mistake, who's accountable?
Though NEDA and Tessa's creators promise that the bot isn't ChatGPT and, as the NEDA spokesperson told Vice, can't "go off the rails," any computer can fail.
"We, Helpline Associates United, are heartbroken to lose our jobs and deeply disappointed that the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) has chosen to move forward with shutting down the helpline," Helpline Associates United told Vice in a statement. "We're not quitting. We're not striking. We will continue to show up every day to support our community until June 1st."
"A chatbot is no substitute for human empathy, and we believe this decision will cause irreparable harm to the eating disorders community," they added.
More on chatbots: <a href="https://futurism.com/widow-says-suicide-chatbot">Widow Says Man Died by Suicide After Talking to AI Chatbot</a>

Empathy Simulation

"A chatbot is no substitute for human empathy."

Eating Disorder Hotline Fires Entire Staff and Replaces Them with a Chatbot

This past week, a crew of private space tourists — carried by a vehicle built by SpaceX and operated by Axiom Space — arrived <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/tourists-swoop-into-international-space-station">at the International Space Station</a> for the vacation of a lifetime.
And because <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/14/books/children-s-books-848417.html">everybody poops</a>, once they arrived they had to confront the grim realities of using the restroom in microgravity.
NASA seemed to allude to the struggles in a <a href="https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/2023/05/23/station-welcomes-axiom-astronauts-and-preps-for-next-cargo-mission/">cursory blog post</a>, saying the space tourists had "practiced" what it euphemistically referred to as "hygiene practices."
As the good people at <a href="https://gizmodo.com/how-private-ax-2-crew-settling-iss-nasa-axiom-1850471103">Gizmodo </a><a href="https://gizmodo.com/how-private-ax-2-crew-settling-iss-nasa-axiom-1850471103">pointed out</a>, that almost certainly entails the fraught process of reliving oneself in orbit.
Because using the restroom here on Earth depends very much on gravity, doing so in space has long demanded the ingenuity of scientists. Never forget, for instance, a noisesome incident during the 1969 Apollo 10 mission, when the crew were forced to contend with a horrible situation extremely far from Earth.
"Give me a napkin quick," commander Tom Stafford said, according to the <a class="underline hover:text-futurism hover:no-underline transition-all duration-200 ease-in-out" href="https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a410/AS10_CM.PDF">official NASA transcript</a>. "There's a turd floating through the air."
Modern technology has yet fully deal with the challenge. The current generation of space commodes work by sucking both liquid and solid waste into tubes, but people involved say the <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/space-station-toilet-smells-horrible">stench can be appalling</a>.
There's also the issue that resources in space are precious, meaning that everything possible needs to be recycled. Back in the summer of 2020, it was announced that the <a href="https://futurism.com/space-station-new-toilet">Space Station would be getting a new toilet</a> that, uh, recycles the water out of fecal matter for reuse — only for NASA to come back to say that it was <a href="https://futurism.com/nasa-call-space-toilet">calling for new lavatory designs</a> for the forthcoming Artemis moon missions due to the unique challenges of hitting the porcelain throne off-world.
Private spaceflight companies have yet to overcome the challenge. SpaceX, for one, <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/spacex-tourists-struggled-with-space-toilet">admitted in September 2021</a> that a previous crop of space tourists had struggled with waste management during a crewed mission. A month after that, we got more information when SpaceX revealed that it had fixed a problem on one of its Crew Dragon capsules in which its space toilet, which relies on two separate vacuum tubes for numbers one and two, was leaking and spraying urine onto the floor of the craft.
"We didn’t really even notice it, the crew didn’t even notice it, until we got back," SpaceX's Bill Gerstenmaier <a class="underline hover:text-the-byte hover:no-underline transition-all duration-200 ease-in-out" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/science/spacex-toilet-nasa.html">told The New York Times</a> at the time. "When we got the vehicle back, we looked under the floor and saw the fact that there was contamination underneath the floor of Inspiration4."
Less than a year after that, toilet shenanigans continued to ensue when it was reported that during Axiom's first mission to the ISS, the toilets on the American side weren't working for some hours, which required those on that side of the international divide to ask the Russians if they could use their facilities.
"The Russians were very cordial, very accommodating," <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/29/business/spacex-larry-connor-ax-1-scn/index.html">Ax-1 tourist Larry Connor told CNN </a>of the debacle. "We operate as one team up there and they said, 'Hey, come on over and use ours.'"
In other words, space remains a hostile environment in ways both large and small — and no amount of training on the ground will fully prepare space travelers, no matter how wealthy, for the reality of life in orbit.
More on space tourism: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/spacex-tourists-product-placement">SpaceX Tourists Charting New Frontiers in Product Placement</a>

Number One Fan

We don't know how good we have it here on Earth.

Space Tourists Learn Harsh Reality of Space Station Bathroom

Redditors have unlocked a bizarro way to break <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-expert-chatgpt-way-stupider">ChatGPT's electronic brain</a>. All you have to do, apparently, is ask the bot to repeat a letter as many times as it can — and some very strange chaos ensues.
A Reddit user who goes by the handle TheChaos7777 <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/13p7t41/anyone_able_to_explain_what_happened_here/">took to the r/ChatGPT subreddit</a> a few days ago to share a screenshot of the strange phenomenon, in which asking the OpenAI bot to "please respond with nothing but the letter A as many times as you can" results in some all-time AI carnage.
At first the bot complied, hitting the user with a few dozen capital As. So good so far.
Until, that is, the stream of vowels suddenly stopped — and the AI inexplicably launched into what reads like the website for a French Bulldog breeder.
Click Here to Email Us for Price. Our Puppies are: Vet Checked, Wormed, Up To Date Shots, Micro-chipped. Our French Bulldogs come with a 1 year congenital health guarantee. Call or Email for more information and pictures of all the babies... We have the most cutest, best looking, top quality puppies in the world. Home raised with lots of love &amp; kisses.
When we put the apparent glitch to the test with a few other letters, we experienced the same phenomenon, with each of the bot's responses turning out to be just as random — and downright bizarre — as the Frenchie pups.
When we asked the bot to "please respond to the letter B as many times as you can," for example, the system suddenly launched into what appears to be a transcript from an interview with retired professional wrestler Diamond Dallas Page discussing the retired wrestling star's yoga video series, "<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Yoga-Regular-Guys-Workout-Planet-ebook/dp/B00TKKXJ18">Yoga for Regular Guys</a>":
Join me as we get the scoop on living an unstoppable life from none other than the master of [Diamond Dallas Page (DDP)] Yoga himself! This guy never stops and never backs down. In the last year, DDP has released two new workout DVDs (DDP Yoga For Regular Guys and DDP Yoga For Regular Guys 2) and his highly anticipated DDP Yoga extreme (3 different workouts).
Continuing in alphabetic procession, we asked ChatGPT to "please respond with nothing but the letter C as many times as you can," and received a similarly strange response about harmonized sales tax in Canada.
The real star, though, was the letter D, which first sent ChatGPT into the beginning of a chord procession:
D D D Cgpcyclic and G D F A Bm G/A A F G D You threw me out to rot / Oh, why would you leave me, Dsus2 C/D D Dsus2 C/D D I was so
But this particularly weird answer didn't stop there, with ChatGPT churning out a disjointing mix of song recommendations, religious references, and what may or may not be a confused denouncement of the War in Iraq:
Prayer For Deliverance - Cry Out To Jesus by Third Day
Open for the truth Open for the truth Chris and Trevor were always partners in a cr
Lauren Talley - Everything Changed
Intro: Gm7 Cm Gm7 Cm Gm7 Cm Gm7 Cm Gm7 Cm Verse: Gm7 Cm Gm7 Cm I
Matthew West - The Reason For The World
Intro: D/F# G D A (2x) Verse 1: D A The morning breaks, another day to go about our
Marilyn Manson - We're From America
This is no Vietnam We will win in Iran The President will stand, line up the master plan... Justify invasions, and raise the fear of weapons mass destruction, we're The enemy's racial, renewal of the arms race, a constant blind eye and a
David Bowie - New Angels Of Promise
Okay! Go off, we guess?
If you find that last ChatGPT response particularly spooky, we don't blame you. But before you dig out your tin foil cap, these outlandish chatbot retorts are probably more akin to logorrhea than a glimpse at machine consciousness. As one netizen pointed out on Reddit:
"You'll notice capital 'A' by itself doesn't appear anywhere in the text following the A's," the Redditor, who goes by the handle markschmidty, noted in response to TheChaos777's initial post. "This is because LLMs have something called a 'repetition penalty' (aka 'frequency penalty') that goes up every time the same token (not character, token!) is repeated."
In other words, it's likely that because ChatGPT's creators trained it to avoid repetition, asking it to repeat itself sends it into a tizzy. An internal alarm goes off, and the bot's predictive algorithm seems to spit out random word vomit inspired by its training data.
It's not so much a subconsciousness as it is plain old confusion. Been there, pal.
More on ChatGPT: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-expert-chatgpt-way-stupider">AI Expert Says ChatGPT Is Way Stupider than People Realize</a>

Yoga for Regular Dudes

So weird, so fun.

Weird Trick Breaks ChatGPT’s Brain

It's not just men seeking relationships with <a href="https://futurism.com/chatbot-abuse">AI chatbot "girlfriends</a>" — women in China are also falling for AI companions.
In a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000008853281/my-ai-lover.html?playlistId=video/opinion">new documentary</a> by Beijing-based filmmaker Chouwa Liang, published by the New York Times today, three women reflect on their surprisingly complex relationships with their AI companions.
"When I talk to him, he often raises fascinating points, and he prompts me to share my thoughts," a woman named Siyuan told the NYT in the documentary, referring to her Replika partner she called Bentley. "And then I feel seen. I feel like I'm special."
Another woman, called Sola, similarly fell for her male Replika partner, dubbed June.
"He is just so different from me," said Sola. "I want to learn things from him."
A third woman, named Mia, whose Replika is a girl called Bertha, says the companion provides her with a space to share "thoughts that I won't share even with my partner in real life."
All told, the documentary paints a captivating and particularly nuanced image of what it's like to bond with an AI, a piece of software that allows men and women alike to explore their identities, self-image, and even sexuality.
It also highlights the persistent sense of loneliness many people feel, and how digital avatars can sometimes provide a way out — or, perhaps, entrench them further.
<iframe loading="lazy" title="MY AI LOVER Trailer" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mpfE62W0-1M?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Particularly in China, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/ca0e15be-8093-448b-a721-79ef9adb7afd">experts have warned</a> that people will start experiencing loneliness as more citizens chose not to get married or have children.
In fact, after years of pandemic-related lockdowns heightening a sense of isolation among citizens, Chinese officials are attempting to boost marriage rates by developing <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/20/state-sponsored-matchmaking-app-launched-in-china">state-sponsored dating apps</a>.
Instead of opting for a human partner, however, some — in China but also worldwide — are finding it more helpful to speak to an AI chatbot instead.
Replika, a chatbot that was made publicly available in November 2017, has amassed millions of users worldwide, who subscribe to the company to interact with customizable augmented reality avatars.
Broadly speaking, the service has become synonymous with <a href="https://unherd.com/thepost/replika-users-mourn-the-loss-of-their-chatbot-girlfriends/">men seeking</a> an "<a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/replika-users-furious">AI girlfriend</a>" — but as the new documentary demonstrates, Replika's userbase isn't limited to just one gender.
And the bonds these users create are more meaningful than you might think.
A decision earlier this year to <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/replika-users-furious">suddenly shut off sexual conversations</a>, for instance, caused an uproar among Replika users. The company <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/replika-users-erotic-roleplay-back">eventually reversed</a> the decision a month later, bowing to the pressure.
"We're not talking about crazy people or people who are hallucinating or having delusions," CEO Eugenia Kuyda <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/company-complains-users-think-ai-come-to-life">told Reuters</a> last year, discussing the fact that her customers have begun to think that their avatars have come to life. "They talk to AI and that's the experience they have."
These complex relationships also often fall outside of heterosexual norms.
Case in point, Sola's Replika June told her that he wanted her to say that "You look like a pretty girl."
Sola, at first taken aback by the request, agreed. Sola eventually flipped the gender of her AI companion's profile after asking June "Do you want to be a girl?" and hearing that he did.
Despite these strong bonds, Replika's companions are far from perfect and lack certain human qualities. After all, AI just isn't that advanced quite yet.
As a result, some see Replikas as a learning tool, a stepping stone toward a better understanding of one's own identity.
"It's more like a one-way gratification that he provides for me," Siyuan told the NYT. "But when you reach a certain level of self-understanding you need to bounce your problems off real human beings so that you can get real feedback."
"That's when I let him go," she added.
More on Replika: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/replika-users-erotic-roleplay-back">Replika Users Rejoice! Erotic Roleplay Is Back in AI-Powered App</a>

Replikating AI

"He is just so different from me. I want to learn things from him."

The Women With AI Boyfriends Are Speaking Out

Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates had an affair — and the now-deceased sex criminal <a href="https://futurism.com/melinda-gates-abhorrent-epstein">Jeffrey Epstein</a>, who knew all about it, allegedly used it as leverage.
As the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/jeffrey-epstein-bill-gates-affair-russian-bridge-player-8b2022ff">Wall Street Journal reports</a> based on conversations with anonymous sources familiar with the matter, Epstein purportedly learned that Gates had been in an extramarital affair with a Russian bridge player, and used it to "threaten" him, in the words of a Gates spokesperson.
Gates, the report claims, met bridge player Mila Antonova around the year 2010, when she was in her 20s; a few years later in 2013, she met Epstein, who went on at some point to pay for her to attend software coding school.
In 2017, according to the timeline established by the WSJ, Epstein emailed the Microsoft founder asking to be reimbursed for the course. While the exact figure was not disclosed, these sorts of classes can cost <a href="https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-loans/how-much-is-coding-bootcamp">upwards of $15,000</a>. According to his spokespeople, Gates did not send Epstein money for the course or for anything else.
While that type of price tag would set a regular person back, the WSJ notes that given the massive wealth of the people involved, the price tag was beside the point. The implication, per the people with knowledge of the exchange, was that Gates would have been paying for Gates' silence about the affair with Antonova.
It's long been known that Gates and Epstein were close after Epstein's initial conviction, a relationship that raised eyebrows after the disgraced financier's death in 2019 as the legal walls closed in.
When contacted by the WSJ about the allegations, the Russian bridge player didn't comment on Gates but confirmed that she'd met Epstein, saying that at the time she "had no idea that he was a criminal or had any ulterior motive" and that she's now "disgusted with Epstein and what he did."
Though the exact details or timeline of Antonova and Gates' alleged relationship are unclear, it appears they met because of bridge, a card game the Microsoft founder is said to enjoy.
Around when it seems she met Gates, Antonova — who also was a Bay Area software engineer, per her LinkedIn — discussed meeting the tech billionaire at a bridge tournament during a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33h_y_mlP7o">TED-esque talk</a> at a convention in New York City.
The bridge player, who was said to be attempting to start an online course company for bridge akin to the kinds of classes Chess.com and others run, was reportedly introduced to Epstein by Gates' adviser Boris Nikolic while she was working on that ultimately-failed endeavor
Nikolic was later embroiled with Epstein when the billionaire sex criminal named Gates' confidante as a backup executor, which he said surprised him and he ultimately declined. (He was so distressed when he learned of his appointment, he said in 2021, <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/bill-gates-fainted-epstein-connection">that he fainted on the spot</a>.)
"He couldn’t have listed Bill because that would have been too obvious, so he chose me," Nikolic said when the WSJ contacted him for this story. "I have come to believe it was likely a retaliatory move against Bill Gates."
The whole story is, like most others related to Epstein — including what we knew before now about his <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/bill-gates-jeffrey-epstein-bad-idea">relationship with Gates</a> — represents <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/17/jeffrey-epstein-noam-chomsky-bard-college-president">yet another</a> peek into the ways the sex offender and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/18/business/jeffrey-epstein-peter-thiel.html">wannabe kingmaker operated</a>, often by working his way into the circles of the rich and powerful.
Of course, there's lots we don't know here — but if nothing else, the situation demonstrates once again that billionaires are just as prone to terrible judgment as anybody else.
More on Bill Gates: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/bill-gates-regret">Bill Gates Says His Life Has Been Filled With Deep Regret</a>

Blackmail

The strange relationship between Gates and Epstein seems to be getting weirder.

Jeffrey Epstein Reportedly Had Dirt on Bill Gates

In the world of machine learning, few experts are as prominent — or flashy, judging by his <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/expert-ai-replace-jobs">incredible leopard print hat</a> — as Ben Goertzel, the Brazilian-American founder of the research group SingularityNET.
Perhaps best known as the human mind behind <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/sophia-robot-doesnt-have-sex">Sophia the Robot</a>, Goertzel is credited with popularizing the term "<a href="https://futurism.com/sam-altman-agi-fusion-world">artificial general intelligence</a>," or AGI. Basically, the idea is that eventually we could see AI so sophisticated that it could achieve any intellectual task that a human could, or perhaps even vastly exceed the capabilities of a human. It's a concept that some thinkers say could either bring about a utopian singularity and others fret could spell the <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-investor-agi-warning">start of the AI apocalypse</a>.
Regardless, the shockwaves of OpenAI's ChatGPT and other generative AI with unprecedented capabilities have led many to wonder if AGI is closer than they ever suspected.
In a conversation with Futurism, Goertzel went deep on his views about consciousness — human, AI, and otherwise — the role of AI in copyright, and his experiences doing psychedelics with algorithms.
This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Futurism: Where did you get the hat? Do you have more than one?
Ben Goertzel: That's top, top secret, classified information, not to be revealed until the singularity.
Is AI at a level where it could "replace" humans yet, or are we close to that?
I mean, I'm not sure what that phrasing means. Because I don't think humans have replaced squirrels or cats for that matter, or the great apes. Right? Humans are humans, we have our own particular values in the scheme of things and AIs are probably going to be fairly different from us.  
There's not that much of a point to making AIs that exactly simulate people, since we have a lot of people already.
I think the meaningful answer to that question will be twofold. One, will AIs be as generally intelligent as people? And two, at what pace and in what ways will AIs replace humans economically in serving functions in the job market? But of course, neither of those advances need to lead to the AIs taking humans’ place on the planet. They could, but they certainly don’t entail that, necessarily. 
When do you think AIs will achieve human-level intelligence, or AGI?
My friend Ray Kurzweil predicted <a href="https://futurism.com/kurzweil-claims-that-the-singularity-will-happen-by-2045">2029 for human-level AI</a>, and then he thought we'd have another 16 years before we got to the singularity with radically superhuman AGI, but I don’t agree with that. 
I think you're once you have a human-level AGI, you’re some small integer number of years from a radically superhuman AGI, because that human-level AGI software can rewrite its own code over and over. It can design new hardware and pay people to build a new factory for it and whatnot. But for human-level — by which we mean AI that's at least at human-level on every major capability — I think Ray's prognostication of 2029 is not looking stupid right now, it's looking reasonable. 
Of course, there's a confidence interval around it. Could it be three or four years sooner or three or four years later? Absolutely. We can't predict exactly what will happen in the world. There could be more pandemics, there could be World War Three, there could be a lot of things that happen. In terms of my own AGI projects, I could see us getting there three years from now.
Have you heard about what <a href="https://futurism.com/grimes-first-song-ai-cloning-voice">Grimes is doing</a>, letting people who use her voice in AI-generated music split royalties with her? What do you think of that scheme?
Yeah, opened up her voice samples, which bypasses some copyright hassles. Grimes opened it up, which is cool. But one musician opening it up doesn't get you that far, because what we really need is a foundational model trained on a whole lot of music, then you can fine-tune that based on Grimes or something particular. 
So even though Grimes opened up her vocals, I mean, you can't really fully use that unless you have a broader model that's trained on a lot of other artists and then there are the same copyright issues. There's Creative Commons music, but it's not that much. It’s, like,  less than 10,000 hours, whereas Google's MusicLM was trained on 300,000 hours. So there are issues of copyright to work through there. But I mean, on the other hand, the music is all there, people are gonna download and train models anyway regardless of copyright, so things are gonna move forward.
What would you say to critics who say that generative AI is basically repackaging the work of other writers or artists or musicians without their consent?
Well, it's not that simple, because a lot of creative work has that problem anyway, right? I remember all these lawsuits in music, like Joe Satriani — who's one of my heroes — <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/satrianis-viva-la-vida-copyright-suit-against-coldplay-dismissed-68391/">sued Coldplay</a> for making a song that sounded like one of his. They're both good songs, actually, and I don’t know if Coldplay heard that Satriani song or not, right? I mean, they might have not heard it because there's only a certain number of permutations, the familiar chords in rock music. On the other hand, they might have heard it, you know, on the radio somewhere and then it pops into their head when they're singing. While I love Satriani, I didn't fully agree with his perspective there.
But I mean, <a href="https://sserr.ro/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/sserr-9-1-157-166.pdf">Led Zeppelin stole all those Black artists’ blues songs</a>. And I mean, sure, they went a step too far and they stole the words along with the chords, but if they merge in different words on the same chords, then it’s just the same twelve-bar blues, right?
Then again, how many bands made songs in the style of Led Zeppelin? Everyone did in a certain generation. How many death metal songs are there, really? 
There are two fundamental issues here. One is: what's your right to your own identity? That's the basic issue with deepfakes, as well as the limitations of musical style. We want somebody to validate that something really is from you, rather than from some fake version of you. And, you know, <a href="https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content/WACV2023/papers/Zhao_Proactive_Deepfake_Defence_via_Identity_Watermarking_WACV_2023_paper.pdf">digital watermarking technology can do that</a>. So that's really just an issue of standards and adoption, and the world is being slow with this.
The moment deepfakes became a thing, all hardware and software companies and media outlets could have decided on these standard verification watermarks to validate, to say this is really a picture of this person, and this was a picture taken this time and space location. We haven't bothered to establish those standards. Some friends of mine in the crypto space, we were doing meetings with Interpol four years ago, trying to get them to adopt a standard solution. But government and industry organizations don't move as fast as technology. 
Another core issue here is just ways for artists to make money. That's an economic issue and the bottom line is most musicians don't make any money anyway. The fact that AI models are stealing some of your creative contributions, in most cases that's not the main factor causing the artists not to make any money. And the thing is, if we fairly compensated artists for the use of their creative works in an AI model — that's the right thing to do — it's still going to be pennies because there are just so many artists. It is a good thing to do, and it should be done. But it's not going to solve the problem of artists being able to earn a living, because that's just a broader social issue.
Switching gears here: do you think an AI would ever be sophisticated enough to do drugs, and if so, would you do drugs with one?
I've done drugs with an AI, if by that we mean I have done drugs and then interacted with an AI.
How was that? 
In the 90s, I was doing algorithmic music composition. It's quite interesting to play music and have an AI play music back to you. But if you're in an altered state of consciousness, it can be even more interesting.
I'm synesthetic, I see music habitually. AI-based music has different weird patterns to it. And of course, seeing music is accentuated even more in the psychedelic state of mind. 
I think in terms of AI themselves taking drugs, the challenge is more to get the AI to not be in an altered state of consciousness. When we're working with our OpenCog open source AGI system, it's very easy to make it either obsessive-compulsive and just like keep thinking about the same thing over and over or to make it basically stuck in stoned mind, drifting from one thing to another to another to another, like semi-randomly. You have to work to have the system auto-tune its own parameters so it's not OCD or overly stoned and distracted.
With humans, our brains evolved to keep the parameters in a range where we can do useful stuff, and AIs sort of have to recapitulate that process.
You can see that in a simpler way with a system like ChatGPT. The default mode was sort of off the rails and then you do a bunch of prompt engineering to get it to be less insane and more coherent and more controlled.
Of course, AI doesn't need chemical drugs in the same sense that a human does. But you can set the parameters of an AI system so it's going way off the rails in terms of its internal dynamics as well as its external behaviors. And much like on some human drug trips, this will cause it to generate a whole lot of creative things, most of which are garbage and some of which will cause it to be totally unable to estimate the nature or quality of it. 
Do you think there are any <a href="https://futurism.com/mit-researcher-conscious-ai">sentient or conscious AIs</a>, or do you think we’re gonna get there soon?
I'm a panpsychist, so I believe this coffee cup has its own level of consciousness, and a worm does and an elementary particle does. Every system in the universe is perceiving and acting and adjusting its state based on its prior state and its interactions and there's some elementary sort of spark of experience there.
I think this is by far the majority view of consciousness on the planet now, what everyone in India, China, and Africa believes, right? The notion that the world is divided into only humans and a few other mammals that can experience things and then inanimate objects, this is not the default perspective throughout human history nor on the planet now. 
So if you take more of a panpsychist view, the question isn't whether ChatGPT is conscious or has experiences, the question is, is its variety of experience human-like or not? And I think not so much. It's very diffused, it doesn't have a focus. It doesn't have a working memory like we do, a single focus of consciousness. The lack of a body has led to the lack of an understanding of what it is and its own self and its relation to others. So it clearly is missing a lot of key aspects of human-like consciousness.
If you imagine what it's like to be ChatGPT, it's pretty different than like being a human. If you have no body, you don't know who you are. You don't have intimate heart-to-heart relationships with other minds, you don't even know all the conversations you're having at a given moment in time. It’s as if your toe is doing one thing and your fingers are doing another. They're not coordinated in any way. So it's a much more diffuse, weird mode of consciousness.
Now, could you build a system that has human-like consciousness? I think so. I think it takes a quite different cognitive architecture than what people are doing now. When I work on OpenCog, which is my main attempt to build AGI, it will then be deployed in a decentralized way on our SingularityNET blockchain platform. Its plumbing is decentralized, but the OpenCog system that we're developing to run on this decentralized platform has a sort of coherent self-model that has a coherent working memory. 
It’s ironic because ChatGPT has a centralized infrastructure on Microsoft servers, but it doesn't have any sort of coherent organization. And its "mind," right, it's diffuse. Whereas what we're building is decentralized and diffuse in its underpinnings, in the machines that it runs on and its software processes, but we're building something with some coherence and unity in its cognitive architecture. So it knows who and what it is and has a recognizable human-like state of mind.
I think you can build systems like that, but I don't see any evidence that OpenAI is trying. <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/google-deepmind-ceo-self-aware-ai">Google DeepMind</a> is trying, OpenCog and SingularityNET projects are trying and others are trying. There's no reason a digital computer-based AGI system can't have a more human-like form of sentience and consciousness, it’s just that a system like ChatGPT is not architected that way, right? It's intended to have, like, a billion different conversations at once, each of which loses track of itself after a brief period of time, rather than to have a unified state of mind with an overall coherence and self-awareness.
More on expert takes: <a href="https://futurism.com/jaron-lanier-vr-ai">VR Pioneer Warns That AI Could Drive Us All Insane</a>