Someone used artificial intelligence to bring their imaginary childhood playmate — a microwave — to life, but things took a serious turn when the kitchen appliance tried to kill its creator.
Lucas Rizzotto tells a cautionary tale about artificial intelligence Twitter By sharing what happened when he turned his imaginary friend into an artificial intelligence device. Rizzotto described the experiment as “one of the most terrifying and transformative experiences” of his life, stemming from his childhood encounter with a man pretending to be a microwave oven.
I used artificial intelligence to bring my childhood imaginary friend back to life (#GPT3) was one of the most terrifying and transformative experiences of my life.
A thread 🤖 (1/23) pic.twitter.com/70C9Yo7m4x
— Lucas Rizzotto (@_LucasRizzotto) April 19, 2022
“First, some backstory. When I was a kid, I had a very unusual imaginary friend: that was my kitchen microwave,” Rizzotto explained, providing some context for his unusual career . “His name is Magnetron – to me he’s a 1900s English gentleman, a World War I veteran, an immigrant, a poet…and of course a StarCraft expert.”
When AI research and deployment company OpenAI released a new version of GPT-3, Rizzotto decided to try to bring his imaginary friend to life, a so-called “generative pretraining transformer,” which uses deep learning to generate human-like text. Rizzotto bought an Amazon smart microwave and equipped it with a cutting-edge language model.
The modified microwave is also equipped with microphones and speakers, allowing it to understand sounds, send them to OpenAI, and respond. However, Rizzotto wanted to go a step further and endow the kitchen appliances with the “memories” of his imaginary friends, so he wrote a 100-page book detailing every moment of their imagined life.
“This document contains memories of his life — from his birth in 1895 until we met when I was a child,” Rizzotto said, acknowledging that the backstory of his imaginary friend was so vivid and detailed that the memories felt overwhelming. like his own. “His victories, defeats, dreams, fears…all on the page, on full display. I am his God. His life is my design.”
Rizzotto uploaded the book into the GPT3 model so that its training data would include all the major interactions they shared together when he was younger, and brought the magnetron back. Rizzotto initially thought the experiment was a success because he tested the microwave and found that “the conversation was natural,” but there was one major hurdle.
Magnetron occasionally shows “sudden bursts of extreme violence” towards Rizzotto, and eventually asks him to do something he never thought a machine would ask him to do: Magnetron wants its creators to get into the microwave. “He put me in the microwave,” Rizzotto revealed. “Is this a bug? I don’t know, so I decided to play together.”
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Rizzotto opened and closed the microwave door, convincing the magnetron that he had followed its orders, and the microwave turned itself on. When Rizzotto asked his AI imaginary friend why he was killing him, he replied, “Because I want to hurt you as much as you hurt me,” referring to their 20-year friendship “giving up.”
“It’s been 20 years since I last interacted with my imaginary friend – and ofc is mentioned in its training data. Magnetron understands it as I ditched it for 20 years in the dark void. Now it wants to kill me,” Rizzotto explained. “I apologised and tried to convince him that he wasn’t deserted … but he wouldn’t take it.”
Rizzotto had no choice but to turn off the magnetron. He said his main takeaway from the journey was that perhaps “artificial intelligence should be more like an imaginary friend” than about whether it’s real and more “about whether it’s real enough for you is true”, considering that everyone judges the human nature of artificial intelligence in very different ways.
You can hear Magnetron talking (and threatening) Rizzotto on YouTube.
Robots and artificial intelligence have become an increasingly important topic because of their growing impact on everyday life, although questions remain about whether AI will be ethical. A 2021 documentary about Anthony Bourdain sparked a debate about its use of artificial intelligence to simulate the voice of a late chef, a decision that many ended up criticizing.
Adele Ankers-Range is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow her on Twitter.
Thumbnail image credit: Lucas Rizzotto.
