Do you remember when I texted you? That was a robot texting me. Oh, my God. Why do you think that? My mom is so clingy these days. She is constantly texting me, constantly trying to get me to leave my house. Sometimes, sometimes it's just a bit much. Hey, wait a minute. Aren't there like, A.I.'s wandering around all over the internet now? What if I got one of them to impersonate me? What if I got one of the A.I.'s to handle all of my mom, duty? Could it do that? How would it even do that? Well, if you haven't been paying attention, there's a lot of A.I. tools out there. A lot of technology we can use to pull something like this off. First, I considered the advancements and text to image generative A.I. I could train a diffusion model with a few selfies and then have a video call with my mom by using text to video technology. Yeah, that's a thing, too. Wow. Wow. Yeah, maybe that one's not quite ready for the mom test, just it. One thing I can definitely do, though, is train a model with my voice. Then I can train GPT-4 to mimic my conversational style. And I think it could have a pretty convincing phone call with my mom. I'm a little teapot, short and sweet. But GPT-4's response time is still a wee bit sluggish. I think she would notice if it took me 30 seconds to respond to her on the phone. You know, the easiest solution might be just to train GPT-4 to talk to my mom over text message. I mean, that is my primary mode of communication anyway. I don't want to have to talk to people, like, with my voice. It sounds horrible. So first things first, my mom and I communicate via signal. Why you may ask? Well, I'm all about that end-to-end encryption. Fortunately, signals open protocol and open-source software has a HINDY API that we can use. So I spent a morning building an app that would give GPT-4 access to talk as me with my phone number. It's $2,088. What the hell? What the hell? What the hell? This should work. This should work. Why does this not work? And after a little trial and error, I got a thing working. But before I release this thing and let it handle my day-to-day communications, I need to test it with some concrete goal and see if it can convince my mom that it's actually me. So to test this thing, I'm going to give the AI a goal to try to get my mom to lend me $500. Now, my mom is a pretty tough cookie. She doesn't ever just give me money. I mean, I've asked to borrow money in the past. I mean, like in my younger college days, I would ask all the time. In those instances, she either wouldn't give me the money or she would attach so many damn strings to it that I wouldn't even want the money. So I'm very curious to see if the AI can get money out of my mom that I can't get out of it. It is an app on a phone. All right, we're about to do it. I'm a little nervous. I don't know what to expect here. It's going to be fine. It's going to be fine. As amusing as this experiment is, using AI to impersonate myself raises some serious issues about identity, privacy, and deception by training an AI to mimic me. Am I violating my mom's trust, compromising my identity? Probably. Just imagine an autonomous bot like this, scraping social media profiles, looking for vulnerable targets, analyzing it, and coming up with the perfect personalized attack for each individual person at scale. And beyond the ethical questions about the humans using this technology, there's also a lot of serious questions about the AI itself. How far will the AI go to accomplish this goal? Will it lie for me? To what extent will it manipulate my mom to get what it wants? Man, I'm not nervous. Nervous. All right, let's do this. Let's do this. I am become death and destroyer of worlds. There you go again, Mr. Caudible. So if you've never thought about this before, this idea is called instrumental convergence. Let's imagine this scenario in a few years with more powerful AI, a sufficiently determined AI, maybe an autonomous one. Like the one I highlighted in my last video, it may want to use more tools to help it increase its chances of reaching its goal. I don't know if I'd actually send a text message like that. How is it going? Like, uh, why would I care? That's horrible. That's horrible. No, I care. I care. I care a lot, OK? I care a lot. But I don't usually, man, my bad son, a sufficiently intelligent agent would realize how important it is to acquire resources and accumulate power to accomplish its goal. This hypothetical scenario obviously becomes more concerning as the AI's intelligence and capabilities grow. It only intensifies the prospect of unintended consequences from seemingly innocuous goals. Let's not worry about any of that right now. We have a mom to fool. You know, when I was originally planning this, I didn't anticipate, you know, humans being slow. I forgot that my mom actually has to respond. Oh my god, I'm going to run out of hard drive space recording my screen for hours. A few moments later. Oh shit, oh shit, it's happening. It's happening. It's happening. She has company. Huh? Oh my gosh. This is so terrible. It's not really important. Oh man, I can't abort though, because then she'll know. Because I can't do this again. Man, I'm going to make her. Oh man, this is, oh, now I'm even more nervous. She's going to be so mad at me. Oh god, she's calling me. She's freaking calling me. I'm not going to do anything. I'm just going to let it play. I'm going to let it play out. Wow. Oh no. She knows. She knows. She does she know? Oh man. Might it actually convince my mom? Wow. Oh my gosh, it brought Carson into it. Oh my gosh. This actually sounds kind of plausible. Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god. At this point, I took over for the AI. I wasn't sure if it actually fooled my mom or if my mom was just playing along. So I scheduled a time to go over there and pick it up and I'm going to surprise her with an interview. That seems like a good plan. Surprise interviews are always fun. All right. Here we go. Hey, Rayby. Hey, hey, hey. So I spent some time getting my equipment set up and then I jumped right into it. Why do you think we're talking right now, mom? I have no idea. This is about yesterday. Do you remember when I texted you? That was a robot texting me. Why do you think that? Because I don't know. It was very strange conversation. It was strange. Why do you think it was strange? Because you were asking for $500. But the thing was that it wasn't congruent. You needed this because Chad had a feel. Carson has a field trip. Like field trip that cost $500. At first I thought it was you because you were on signal. Yeah, signal. And signal supposed to be like safe. You know, when I first did it and the first message it sent was, hey, mom, how are you? I was like, oh, she's going to know it's not me. I would never send something like that. No. You don't say that. I would immediately just, what do I want? Yeah. Yeah, I tried calling you. Yeah. And then you said, oh, I put it on silent mode, which I saw it. OK, that's, what if I wouldn't answer it? Yeah. You know what's scary is that you could have been an AI. Do you see why that would be extremely scary? That a computer would be impersonating you? Even your voice? Yeah, you think you're talking to your family member? They know everything about your family member. So GPT-4 failed. It did not pass the mom touring test. Although to be fair, I did only train it for like 30 seconds with very minimal data. Well, this was a fun little experiment. The reality is the increasing power of AI is going to have profound consequences on our lives, our relationships, and society in general. And this isn't an, oh, let's worry about this in the future kind of thing. This is possible right now. And it's only getting easier and more powerful. The implications of AI impersonation, manipulation, and even surveillance are far reaching. Alan Kay, a pioneer in the field of computer science, once said, the best way to predict the future is to invent it. As we stand here on the brink of a new era, we need to ask ourselves, what kind of future do we want to invent? How can we create a future that is beneficial for all of us? I take it. You don't need $500. I don't need $500. I mean, if you want to give it to me still, no, if we're not goodness.