For many years, we have imagined what life would be like if artificial intelligence took over the world. In some movies we have been told that the machines would start a war and try to dominate all living things and until now it seemed really crazy.
Turns out a Twitter user named Lucas Rizzotto told the chilling story of how he turned his imaginary friend into an artificial intelligence (AI) device and, just like in a horror movie, it tried to kill him.
As recounted by Rizzotto, his experiment was one of the most terrifying and transformative experiences of his life, stemming from his “imaginary encounters with an imaginary microwave man.” Giving some context to his story, he explained:
As a child, I had a really unusual imaginary friend: the microwave oven in my kitchen. His name was Magnetron and, in my opinion, he was an English gentleman of the 1900s, a veteran of World War I, an immigrant, a poet… and, of course, an expert player of ‘StarCraft’.
Following his childhood dreams, Rizzotto tried to bring his imaginary friend to life when OpenAl, a company dedicated to implementing artificial intelligence, released a version of GPT-3, better known as a generative pre-trained transformer that uses deep learning. to generate text. He then purchased a smart microwave through Amazon and outfitted it with the latest AI model.
In the end, the oven had modifications with speakers and had the ability to understand a voice, send it to the OpenAi system and give a response. However, the experiment did not end there, because he wanted to give the device the “memories” of his imaginary friend, so he wrote a 100-page book detailing every moment of his life. The document had lifelong memories of him, from his birth in 1895 to when they met when Rizzotto was a child.
Initially, the experiment was a success, because the conversations flowed naturally. However, then a minor hiccup occurred, Magnetron would occasionally have sudden outbursts of extreme violence, until he finally asked something unthinkable of him: “He asked me to go into the microwave, I had no idea if it was a mistake, but I decided to play along.” ”.
Rizzotto opened the door and pretended to have carried out Magnetron’s order and then the microwave turned on by itself. Surprised by this situation, he asked him why he had tried to kill him, to which he replied:
Because I wanted to hurt you the same way you hurt me.
Apparently, Magnetron was referring to the 15 years since the last time the two had interacted and taking the memories he had of the war, the artificial intelligence interpreted this as abandonment.
Rizzotto apologized and tried to convince him that he hadn’t abandoned him, but he just wouldn’t accept it, so he had no choice but to close it. In conclusion, Rizzotto learned that AIs are simply meant to be more like imaginary friends and don’t have to be real enough.