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Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice

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Re: Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice

#221

Post by arendtio »

awfulneutral wrote: post #210
arendtio wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sure that if you talk to a dog, it will probably take as much from your emotions as your words (to disprove your point about non-humans). You look at it in binary categories, but instead, it is always some amount of information and some amount of randomness. An LLM can predict emotions similarly to words. Emotions and social dynamics from an LLM are as valid as the words it speaks. Most of the time, they are cor…

Yes, fair enough about the dog - "non-human" was the wrong choice of words. But I don't agree that emotions and social dynamics from an LLM are valid. Emotions need real stakes behind them. They communicate the inner state of another being. If that inner state does not exist (maybe it could in an AGI, but I don't believe it could in an LLM), then I'd say the communication is utterly meaningless.

> communication is utterly meaningless.

Well, at least to some extent. I mean, changing the inner state of an AI (as they are being built today) certainly is, because it does not affect other beings. However, the interaction might change your inner state. Like looking at an AI-generated image and finding it beautiful or awful. Similarly, talking to Miles or Maya might let you feel certain emotions.

I think that part can be very meaningful, but I also agree that current AI is built to not carry its emotional state into the world outside of the direct interaction.

Re: Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice

#222

Post by walterbell »

noman-land wrote: post #162
jonplackett wrote: post #45

My end-of-the-world AI prediction is everyone gets a phone call all at the same time and the voice on the end of the phone is so perfect they never put the phone down again. Maybe they do whatever it asks them to, maybe it’s just lovely.

Yet another reason not to answer the phone for unknown numbers.

Like Daemon (2011).

Re: Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice

#223

Post by underdeserver »

moralestapia wrote: post #220
underdeserver wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know people who worked on it. It was real. They used real people for some calls, in some cases, but a vast majority of calls made through the system with 100% automatic.

Source: trust me, bro. Meanwhile, the CEO of the f company admitted it was false , but sure, you know better ;).

He didn't, otherwise you would have linked to a quote. But OK. Believe what you want.

Re: Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice

#224

Post by pmarreck »

kats wrote: post #203
pmarreck wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And phones enable scams. So your idea is to… Abandon all telephony?? You should not judge a tool by the worst use someone can come up with it

It's the most common use by far.

There's a bunch of youtubes that seem to use it, so there's that

Re: Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice

#225

Post by satisfice »

noodlesUK wrote: post #147

I tried the demo, but I decided to not say anything. It desperately tried to make me talk. The entire experience was bizarre and unsettling - another commenter described it as a northern Californian startup CEO’s level of strange fake enthusiasm. As a Brit, I found the level of synthetic bubbliness in the voice extremely off-putting. I’d hate to live in a world where that was the way everyone behaved in real life. Th…

Thank you for making the comment I wanted to make.

Re: Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice

#226

Post by satisfice »

The whole experiment is profoundly wrong-headed. It should be considered tantamount to consumer fraud to present a robot that appears to have emotional intelligence when it has no such thing.

This software is a con artist. I mean that literally. It's not LIKE a con artist, it is literally attempting to con the user into forming assumptions about its intentions and mental states that its creators know to be false.

Re: Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice

#228

Post by micw »

Mistletoe wrote: post #36
monroewalker wrote: post #2

This was already posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43221377 but I’m really surprised at the lack of attention this model is getting. The responsiveness and apparent personality are pretty mind blowing. It’s similar to what OpenAI had initially demoed for advanced voice mode, at least for the voice conversation portion. The demo interactions are recorded, which is mentioned in their disclaimer under th…

Just realizing how uncanny valley it is to talk to AI and it never remembers anything you said in the past. Imagine if a human did that. It’s like you are talking to Tom Hanks’ Mr. Short Term Memory from SNL over and over. https://youtube.com/watch?v=C6ufImch00g

I does remember but you have to ask for. Try to say "make a bookmark at this point" and later ask for that bookmark. You can even give the bookmark a name or ask it to do so for you.

Re: Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice

#229

Post by cl3misch »

tovej wrote: post #217
cl3misch wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's also immediately clear to me when I look at the architecture of transformers that reasoning is not in the cards. I'm not saying that's incorrect, but thb that's exactly the tautology I was talking about!

That's not a tautology. That's the summary of the argument itself. If you want to know more, then a good reason why it can't be reasoning is that there is no evaluation of the truth value of any statement at any point, only the likelihood of the statement being found in the training set. This evaluation has no relationship with truth. If no statement is ever evaluated, it's not logical reasoning, because logical reas…

> there is no evaluation of the truth value of any statement at any point

You could argue that the attention part of the network is some form of truth validation of the next predicted token? But indeed, the current chat interfaces don't change their previous text output retroactively.

Still, I am not really convinced. If we assume a human can reason, what does "evaluation of the truth value" mean? Thinking about something? This is still performed with our implicit mental model of the world, coming from shadows on a cave's wall, right?

Re: Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice

#230

Post by agnishom »

mentalgear wrote: post #108

While impressive, the paramount question stands: Why do we even need "emotional" voices? All that emotionality adds is that you get the illusion of a friend - a friend that can't help you in any way in the real world and who's confidentiality is as strong as the privacy policies & data security of the company running it - which often ultimately trends towards 0. Smart Neutral Voice Assistants could be a great help, b…

This was the first thing I asked it. It was like, "Dark-patterns? Me? what?"
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