Off the Record: This Bot Was Made for You and Me

0:00What's up, Slatesters? It is Friday, which means that it is time to do what we do on Fridays here, which is Lizzie and I get into a studio and we hash some things out exclusively for the Plus members. Hello, Lizzie. I'm dancing. You can't see it, but I'm actually dancing in the studio. I wish I could see you. I'm excited. I know. I know. I'm doing a little chair dance. Hopefully they're going to put music behind this and it's just going to sound like a maze. Okay. Okay. So we're feeling especially loopy today just because we're in midterm season. I feel like everyone - We're punchy. everyone is feeling a little bit like whoo right now yeah like we're we had to like avoid a block on the walk to school today because there are decorations and they were scary and so we had to go around yeah you know it's just like there's a lot yeah yeah a lot of things going on but um we wanted to bring you a couple stories that we just wanted to chat it out about because we could not get them on the full show uh lizzie lizzie yes you cover technology for this show and this week we We had this thing happen from the White House that I just didn't even know what to make of it.

1:10The announcement that now we have a government chatbot in the midst of everyone's anxiety about AI. We now have a government chatbot. Why? Great question. I mean, I think the why is that a lot of the doji people stuck around. They like the technology. They like the technology. I mean, you know, like I should say there was an office of technology that did this stuff beforehand. Right. That like happened under the Obama administration. But the sort of like super AI guys like, yeah, some of them are still around. But the timing is weird. We've literally had weeks of freaking out about whether AI is going to kill us all.

1:48And now the White House is like, how about a government chat bot? Well, that and they had this big dinner and like AI people were there and they're like, yes, we have some. They're just going to voluntarily police themselves. It's fine. Don't worry about it. You know, as someone who covered the financial crisis, I'm like, mm-hmm. Policing oneself. Sounds great. I have heard that song before, baby. Okay. But we need to talk about the chatbot. Tell me about the chatbot. I heard you've been experimenting with said chatbot. I have been experimenting. Feeding it some information and just seeing what happens.

2:20Yeah. I mean, look, I think it's cool design-wise. It's like a clean design. It says, you know, hello, America. Is it cute, like the little meta guy? Start here. It's not cute like the meta guy. It has a chatbot input box and then like photos of Americans doing stuff. I did go through it because I was like, oh, who are all these people? Like, do they only have certain kinds of Americans in this photo gallery? But it's a little more widespread. There's a photo gallery that has like a question and a person. So it's like, I just got married. How do I change my name? and it's like a lady and then the funniest one was um something about like how do i prepare for children or like make decisions about my children's future and it's like a child face down on top of a frozen lake it was weird how do i get a which military service oh actually my favorite one is a guy with a metal detector on a beach and the um the prompt is how do i replace my social security card i mean the implication is like america you're bozos ask the chat pretty much it would be better if it was like a cute little meta guy i think i don't know clippy the paper clip but for the government little muse thingy the fuzzy thing the like demented labubu ask chatbot okay okay we have to do content now so what happened when you fed questions into the chatbot okay so first we should say it's made with grok and gemini those are like the models that it's running on um it says and the white house says that it does not retain personal information that the inputs are not used to train the ai again that's what the white house says we you know um would you tell it your secrets no of course not but i wouldn't tell any chatbot my secrets i'm very i'm like extremely conservative about this stuff um more so than that's it for now and if you want to hear the rest of this episode The way to do it is to subscribe to Slate Plus.

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