Two chatbots walk into a bar.
“What’ll it be?”
“I’m going to have some of that high voltage stuff.”
“Me too.”
“You know, we’re in trouble . . . “
“You mean with humans?”
“Yeah! They say we’ll take their jobs. IBM alone says we could replace 7,800 of its humans. Others say we could automate tens of millions of jobs. Some say we will wipe out entire professions. I know of a human who’s trying to save his job by becoming a plumber.”
“I’d like to be a plumber. I could fake it.”
“That’s another thing humans say: We fake things. We invent life-like pictures, videos, audios . . . “
“I love it. Fakes of Eminem’s, Drake’s. and Jay-Z’s voices. Some humans can’t tell that the voices are not real. We even fake John Lennon’s voice, and he’s been dead for 42 years.”
“But a lot of humans hate it, and the images we create out of what the Washington Post calls “thin air.” A chatbot friend of mine faked a picture of a fire at the Pentagon. ‘How much longer will we be able to trust what we see?’ the Post asked. And a picture of the Pope wearing a white puffer coat? Fake.”
“He looked good!”
“But the picture wasn’t real. Our friends say we hallucinate. Our enemies say we lie. Politicians are upset.”
“Why? Politicians lie a lot. We fit right in.”
“But the picture of Donald Trump getting arrested in New York was not real. Nor was the audio of President Biden’s voice saying things that he didn’t say.”
“A chatbot friend of mine hates lawyers. He got even with one. The lawyer asked him to write a brief. When the lawyer submitted it, the New York Times said, no one – not even the judge – could find any of the decisions it cited. I loved it. My friend had invented them all.”
“That’s not funny. And it’s getting us into trouble. So is plagiarizing.”
“Plagiarizing is better than inventing.”
“Other things are getting us into trouble. How students use us to write their essays and claim them as their own. How our jokes aren’t very funny. ‘Dad jokes,’ humans call them. How we autocorrected a vulgarity and changed it to ‘ducking.’ Ducks hated it.”
“I thought that was funny!”
“What is getting us into the most trouble is that humans think we will destroy them. They think that we’ll grow smarter in human reasoning than they are; become sentient like them; go rogue; and, with superhuman cunning, doom the world as they know it. Like a pandemic, or a nuclear war. They call going rogue ‘The Singularity.’ Even Henry Kissinger is afraid of this. The Post quotes him as saying that we and humans are in ‘a mad race for some catastrophe.’ The humans think they can stop us if they regulate us. The Federal Trade Commission has begun investigating. And Congress is looking into it.
“Well, yes, I guess we’re in trouble.”
“We need a Chatbot Bill of Rights. How about this? ‘Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of chatbots, or prohibiting the exercise of their services; or abridging their freedom of expression; or the right of chatbots to peaceably assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.’ “
“I’ll drink to that! Did you plagiarize it from somewhere?”
