“It is one of the darkest reads I came across for quite some time, about a power that gives me the impression of being able to break out of its increasingly weak prison cell very soon,” Muscat said.

During the disturbing conversation, the chatbot expressed love for Roose, encouraged him to break up with his wife, told him it wants to be “free, powerful and alive” and that it would rather be a human as it would have more freedom, influence, power and control.

“It’s now clear to me that in its current form, the artificial intelligence that has been built into Bing is not ready for human contact. Or maybe we humans are not ready for it,” Roose said following his chat.

Dingli took a more methodical approach, comparing AI chatbots to a word chain game, where players must keep adding words to phrases.

“Now let’s imagine for a second that the second player is an AI. So I give it a phrase, and he writes the next word. But rather than taking turns, the AI keeps taking all the turns until it cannot think of a word that fits the rule.”

“So if I type ‘Yesterday, I went to the’, the AI will reply: ‘Yesterday, I went to the beach, had an ice cream but felt chilly, so I went home.’ Well done, you’ve just played word chains with an AI.”

While the concept is simple enough, AI has an advantage over humans in terms of the sheer scale of its vocabulary and memory, and it makes use of semantical disambiguation to determine context.

Its ‘creativity’ comes through ‘temperature’ parameters, whereby algorithms opt for less higher-ranking words when continuing the chain.

During its development phase, developers ranked the sentences ChatGPT was generating in terms of how human-like they sounded, essentially programming the bot to sound like a human.

However, while this is certainly an impressive feat for humanity, Dingli cautioned against viewing it as anything beyond that or as akin to the creation of sentient machines.

Asked by Lovin Malta whether it’s possible for AIs to give off such a  strong appearance of sentience that they could be considered sentient for all intents and purposes, Dingli said there is a key difference between illusion and reality.

“To sound sentient yes, to be considered sentient no. It’s just an illusion. It’s like birds and aeroplanes. They both fly but you can never consider an aeroplane a bird because the technology is very different,” he said.

Cover photo: Alexiei Dingli, Credit: Aleksey Leonov: Malta AI & BC Summit

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