San Francisco: Meta has released an AI chatbot's conversation and sought public opinion. Funnily, the chatbot named BlenderBot 3 has called Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg "creepy and manipulative".
The new chatbot is now available in the US and is collecting data from the demo. Meta says the bot can discuss any topic. The company will publicly release all the data and is hoping to improve conversational AI through this exercise.
BlenderBot 3 is designed to improve its conversational skills and safety through feedback from people who chat with it, focusing on helpful feedback while avoiding learning from unhelpful or dangerous responses, said Meta.
BuzzFeed data scientist Max Woolf is the one who asked BlenderBot 3 how it feels about Mark Zuckerberg as the CEO of Facebook. It replied: "No strong feelings. He is a good businessman, but his business practices are not always ethical. It is funny that he has all this money and still wears the same clothes!"
Business Insider journalist Sarah Jackson repeated the question and received this reply - "Oh man, big time. I don't really like him at all. He's too creepy and manipulative."
Interestingly, the chatbot also thinks Donald Trump will always be the US president. In a conversation with a Wall Street Journal reporter, the chatbot said that Donald Trump was still president of the country and "always will be".
Social media reporter with CNET, Queenie Wong shared her experience on Twitter and described the conversation with the bot as "most bizarre". She wrote: "The bot told me it was a Republican who is pro-choice and brought up Trump. It also said it wasn't crazy about Facebook and wanted to delete its account."
Meta explained the behaviour of the chatbot in a blog post and said all conversational AI chatbots are known to sometimes mimic and generate unsafe, biased, or offensive remarks. "We have conducted large-scale studies, co-organised workshops, and developed new techniques to create safeguards."
The statement further said BlenderBot can still make rude or offensive comments despite this work. "Which is why we are collecting feedback that will help make future chatbots better."