I’ve been interacting with OpenSim bots — or NPCs — for almost so long as I’ve been overlaying OpenSim. Which is about 15 years. (Oh my God, has it actually been that lengthy?)
I’ve been hoping that OpenSim writing would change into by day job, however, sadly, OpenSim by no means actually took off. As an alternative, I lined cybersecurity and, extra lately, generative AI.
However then I noticed some reporting a few new research about AI, and instantly thought — this might actually be one thing in OpenSim.
The research was printed this previous April within the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness, and it confirmed {that a} majority of individuals – 67% to be precise – attribute a point of consciousness to ChatGPT. And the extra individuals use these AI programs, the extra possible they’re to see them as acutely aware entities.
Then, in Might, another study confirmed that 54% of individuals, after a dialog with ChatGPT, thought it was an actual particular person.
Now, I’m not saying that OpenSim grid house owners ought to run out and set up a bunch of bots on their grids that fake to be actual individuals, with the intention to lure in additional customers. That might be dumb, costly, a waste of sources, presumably unlawful and undoubtedly unethical.
But when customers knew that these bots have been powered by AI and understood that they’re not actual individuals, they may nonetheless get pleasure from interacting with them and develop attachments to them — identical to we get connected to manufacturers, or cartoon animals, or characters in a novel. Or, sure, digital girlfriends or boyfriends.
Within the video under, you possibly can see OpenAI’s current GPT-4o presentation. Yup, the one the place ChatGPT sounds suspiciously like Scarlett Johansson in “Her.” I’ve set it to begin on the level within the video the place they’re speaking to her.
I can see why ScarJo obtained upset — and why that specific voice is not obtainable as an choice.
Now, as I write this, the voice chatbot they’re demonstrating isn’t broadly obtainable but. However the textual content model is — and its the textual content interface that’s most typical in OpenSim anyway.
GPT-4o does value cash. It costs money to send it a question and to get a response. 1,000,000 tokens price of questions — or 750,000 phrases — prices $5, and one million token’s price of response prices $15.
A web page of textual content is roughly 250 phrases, so one million tokens is about 3,000 pages. So, for $20, you will get lots of back-and-forth. However there are additionally cheaper platforms.
Anthropic’s Claude, for instance, which has examined higher than ChatGPT in some benchmarks, costs a bit less — $3 for one million enter tokens, and $15 for one million output tokens.
However there are additionally free, open-source platforms that you simply run by yourself servers with comparable efficiency ranges. For instance, on the LMSYS Chatbot Area Leaderboard, OpenAI’s GPT-4o in in first place with a rating of 1287, Claude 3.5 Sonnet is shut behind with 1272, and the (principally) open supply Llama 3 from Meta isn’t too far distant, with a rating of 1207 — and there are a number of different open supply AI platforms on the prime of the charts, together with Google’s Gemma, NVIDIA’s Nemotron, Cohere’s Command R+, Alibaba’s Qwen2, and Mistral.
I can simply see an OpenSim internet hosting supplier including an AI service to their bundle offers.
Think about the potential for creating actually immersive experiences in OpenSim and different digital environments. If customers are predisposed to see AI entities as acutely aware, we may create non-player characters that really feel extremely actual and responsive.
This might revolutionize storytelling, training, and social interactions in digital areas.
We may have bots that customers can type significant relationships with, AI-driven characters that may adapt to particular person consumer preferences, and digital environments that really feel alive and dynamic.
After which there’s the potential for interactive storytelling and video games, with quests and narratives which might be extra participating than ever earlier than, create digital assistants that really feel like true companions, and even construct communities that blur the strains between AI and human members.
For these utilizing OpenSim for work, there are additionally functions right here for enterprise and training, within the type of AI tutors, AI government assistants, AI gross sales brokers, and extra.
Nevertheless, as a lot as I’m thrilled by these potentialities, I can’t assist however really feel a twinge of concern.
Because the research authors level out, there are some dangers to AIs that really feel actual.
First, there’s the danger of emotional attachment. If customers begin to view AI entities as acutely aware beings, they may type deep, doubtlessly unhealthy bonds with these digital characters. This might result in a spread of points, from social isolation in the true world to emotional misery if these AI entities are altered or eliminated.
We’re already seeing that, with individuals feeling actual misery when their digital girlfriends are turned off.
Then there’s the query of blurred actuality. As the road between AI and human interactions turns into much less clear, customers would possibly wrestle to tell apart between the 2.
Personally, I’m not too involved about this one. We’ve had individuals complaining that different individuals couldn’t inform fantasy from actuality because the days of Don Quixote. In all probability even earlier. There have been in all probability cave individuals sitting round, saying, “Have a look at the younger individuals with all their cave work. They may very well be out truly looking, and as a substitute they sit across the cave wanting on the work.”
And even earlier, when language was invented. “Have a look at these younger individuals, sitting round speaking about looking, as a substitute of going on the market into the jungle and catching one thing.”
When motion pictures have been first invented, when individuals began getting “addicted” to tv, or video video games… we’ve at all times had ethical panics about new media.
The factor is, these ethical panics have been additionally, to some extent, justified. Perhaps the pulp novels that the printing press gave us didn’t rot our brains. However Mao’s Little Crimson Ebook, the Communist Manifesto, that factor that Hitler wrote that I don’t even was aided and abetted by the books they wrote.
In order that’s what I’m most fearful about — the potential for exploitation. Unhealthy actors may misuse our tendency to anthropomorphize AI, creating misleading or manipulative experiences that make the most of customers’ emotional connections and cause them to be extra tolerant of evil.
However I don’t assume that’s one thing that we, in OpenSim, have to fret about. Our platform doesn’t have the sort of attain it could take to create a brand new dictator!
I believe the worst that will occur is that individuals would possibly get so engaged that they spend a number of {dollars} greater than they deliberate to spend.