Chatbots Are Pushing Us Toward a Post-Human Internet
"Chatbots increasingly interact in recursive loops, replacing human roles in work, education, and romance. Risks include amplified errors and bias, as seen in job screening and medical tools. Such exchanges may dilute human contact and create unequal access.
In matters of work, school and even romance, we turn to A.I. chatbots. But what happens when the bots begin talking to one another?
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Remember job applications? You know, you’d write a résumé and a cover letter. Someone would read them. You’d fish out a tasteful button-down and try to charm your interviewer. Maybe your one-liner or a question about your amateur bowling career would help you score the position. Maybe you’d never hear back.
That’s all changing. When Christian Vinson applied for jobs in finance this year, he knew he was really auditioning for artificial intelligence. Many companies now use screening software to sift through piles of applications, so he spent close to 10 hours teaching two A.I. chatbots about his work experience. He filled in details about his education, a banking internship and five years in the Army. He then prompted the bots to tailor his cover letter to hundreds of job listings.
A.I. had written his applications, and A.I. was reading them too — a dog chasing its own tail. “This is the new normal,” says Vinson, 30, who landed a job at an investment bank in New York.
We live in a world in which A.I. tools have found their way to the center of a staggering number of professional, academic and personal interactions. Lately these chatbots and agents have been doing more than just talking to us. Students are writing essays with ChatGPT, and teachers are using A.I. to grade them. Workers are sending lengthy A.I.-generated emails to colleagues, who are responding with walls of chatbot text of their own. A.I podcast hosts are holding forth with A.I. podcast guests on topics like gas prices, the Iran war — and artificial intelligence. Tech wants to take all this even further: In March, Meta acquired a social network designed for bots to talk to one another.
The dead internet theory, a concept popular in tech circles, holds that most digital traffic will eventually be software, leaving humans as a minority voice. We may now have a corollary of that prediction — let’s call it a bot loop — when the humans on both sides of an interaction hand over their role to artificial intelligence. These recursive exchanges can be eerie and error-prone, a single mistake bouncing back and forth uncorrected over and over. Stranger still, they flip our conversational dynamic inside out, turning chatbots into the interlocutors and humans into their enablers.
Depending on whom you ask, bot loops might be banal, dystopian or genuinely useful. No matter how people feel about them, researchers say we’re going to see bot loops much more often as we deputize A.I. systems to do our bidding.
Someday in the not-too-distant future, a pipe will burst and you will need a plumber in a hurry. Maybe you will call 10 plumbers yourself to ask about rates — but perhaps you will turn all of that dialing over to a kind of personal digital assistant that can perform tasks like sending emails, buying plane tickets and writing code. Plumbers, meanwhile, may struggle to keep up with an influx of calls from tireless A.I. assistants, says Jiaxin Pei, an assistant professor at the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. Maybe they’ll direct an agent of their own to act as a virtual receptionist. “This is this endless loop we’re creating,” Pei says. How will all this affect the way we interact with one another?
Looked at one way, human history is one long string of freakouts about the potential for new technology to alter our communication. Socrates worried that writing would wreck our memory — something we know only because Plato wrote it down. Early-20th-century critics argued that the telephone posed a threat to civility. Repeatedly, detractors have predicted that the quality of our interactions might suffer as a result of modern convenience. The author of a 1994 article in The New York Times argued that electronic mail was “so compelling and easy that it threatens to overwhelm its usefulness through sheer volume and lack of consideration,” although he conceded that it did have its perks: “There are no stamps to lick.”
None of these innovations brought about the end of productive discussion, although each has changed its texture. We can now trade messages with more people than ever without needing to be in the same physical space. As a result, researchers think we may actually be speaking to one another less. Many of our conversations take place on platforms that incentivize certain kinds of exchanges, particularly those that are heated, outlandish or otherwise likely to retain our attention for the platforms’ financial gain.
Still, A.I. is different from these previous advancements. While email transmits messages between people, chatbots emulate people — and perhaps replace them. All of a sudden, humans get to decide whether they would prefer to have a conversation with a person or with a program that approximates one. Plenty of people are deciding that they would prefer to go to a chatbot for financial advice, medical diagnoses or companionship.
People are already using A.I.-generated avatars to speak for them. When Justin Lester, a pastor in the Bay Area, isn’t available, people can speak withhis “digital twin.” The next step is very likely a future in which the people’s own digital twins might speak with Lester’s. Increasingly, our digital intermediaries will collide. We’ll talk to our bots, and our bots will talk to one another. Chief executives have created A.I.-powered avatars that can meet with their employees. How long will it be before their underlings send their avatars to those meetings, too?
Plenty of people are already living in this strange new world. I’ve spent the past couple of months interviewing them. There was a graduate student completing work with A.I. that was being graded by his professor’s virtual assistants. There was a telecom executive who had noticed customers sending A.I. voice agents to argue with his company’s A.I. customer service system. There was a man who used a chatbot to draft messages on a dating app to a woman who seemed to be doing the exact same thing. “How long are we gonna ChatGPT each other?” he eventually wrote. She never responded.
Most of these people acknowledged a certain hollowness to the interactions, which followed the basic contours of a human conversation but got the texture all wrong. A single bot creates mountains of text that are dazzling in their phoniness, like costume jewelry. Stick two of them together in conversation and they generate an endless flow of dialogue that follows all the rules yet still stands out for what it is missing: curiosity, empathy, actual experience.
The risks of these loops are still coming into view, but one big problem is just how frequently chatbots get things wrong. When two A.I. systems interact, particularly ones powered by the same large language models, they may miss each other’s errors and eventually amplify them, says Soheil Feizi, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Maryland. “They are just sharing the same blind spots,” he says.
A recent paper by a researcher at Harvard Medical School considered how this might play out in a hospital setting. Say one A.I. tool is responsible for analyzing X-rays to label broken bones. It sends an assessment to another A.I. tool that assigns rooms and a third one that determines the order of patient treatment. If an initial scan is incorrect and never subject to human verification, the error could echo through the entire network and affect the patient, the doctor and her clinic.
An even sneakier issue is that artificial intelligence systems seem to be biased toward their own work. One study found that A.I. résumé screeners preferred applications written by A.I. to ones written by humans. (In that way, Vinson, the chatbot-happy job applicant, may have helped his own chances.) This phenomenon may already be wreaking havoc on the college admissions process, in which some schools use A.I.-powered essay readers to score submissions that, no doubt, are often generated by chatbots.
Despite these shortcomings, Sarah Davis, a cultural anthropologist and the dean of St. John’s College in Santa Fe, N.M., wonders whether people might grow so accustomed to the smoothness of A.I.-to-A.I. interactions that they could lose their tolerance for the necessary unpredictability of human relationships. She says she worries about chatbots allowing a “kind of ease that lets us become worse versions of ourselves, and a kind of alienation, a lack of togetherness that requires that we face friction.”
It might be tempting to think of the bot loop as a stopover on the way to some totally autonomous world. Perhaps A.I.-generated “counterfeit people,” as the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett called them, will work together to create even more counterfeit people, exploiting our dependence on A.I. systems and putting human civilization itself at risk. The likelier outcome is that the share of interactions that are between humans will just shrink as the share of bot-to-bot interactions grows — a profound dilution that affects the way we move through the world.
In that case, the human voice on the phone that once was a reasonable expectation might become a rare privilege, something akin to a luxury good. Sure, you can talk to a flesh-and-blood receptionist, but it will cost extra. Paradoxically, the people most likely to be able to afford such a luxury might be the ones being enriched by the A.I. boom. Will they use their spoils to get access to the kinds of conversations they are making rarer for everybody else? That might just be the most insidious loop of all.
Source images for illustration above: Keeproll/Getty Images; ZeynepKaya/Getty Images; Yaroslav Kushta/Getty Images.“
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