The real significance of new AI technology is not that machines can be like humans but that humans are prone to deception, argues Simone Natale.
In the last few weeks, the official Twitter account of the Perseverance Mars Rover, a car-sized robot designed by NASA to explore Mars, attracted news media attention and a steadily growing number of followers. While many marvelled at the photos of the Red Planet that the account posted, some asked if the fact that the account is tweeting in the first person - as if it was the Rover itself reporting from Mars and not NASA’s PR office – amounts to a form of deception. Is anthropomorphization an honest way to communicate the rover’s functioning to the public? Are we being led to project consciousness and sociality onto a machine that has neither?
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Similar questions about Artificial Intelligence (AI) are being posed more and more frequently. As AI technologies become more pervasive and influential, many fear that it will become more difficult to distinguish between “real” AI technologies and blatant frauds. They point to AI and robotics companies using marketing tools and design features that exaggerate the apparent intelligence of robots. This debate, however, misses an important point. If we want to really understand the social and cultural dynamics activated by the new generation of AI and robots, we need to acknowledge that deception is not an incidental feature of these technologies. It is not, in other words, something that only characterizes certain uses and expressions of AI technology. Deception is, instead, ingrained in the very essence of what AI is and how it works. It is as central to AI as the circuits and software that make it run.
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