What do you think of the AI Darth Vader chat bot in Fortnite?
It's really insane on so many levels. The most obvious one is Disney's obsession with making the space nazi faction look friendly, cool and valid. Darth Vader killed 2 billion people on Alderaan just as a scare tactic to intimidate Princess Leia. But let's make that guy kid friendly. Let's have him congratulate you on getting the dub. Let's hear him say how cool Peter Griffin is. But he can't (or at least, isn't supposed to be able to) swear. He can't talk about the very real scenes in these movies where he prepares to kill children. The space nazi is your friend. Don't you want to join the space nazis Empire?
And the entire delusion of treating this like it's a celebrity cameo. Like they "got" Darth Vader. The real Darth Vader. He's in Fortnite now. He talks to you and responds to you as long as you stay within his parameters of conversation.
Except people are obviously already getting the guy to swear, or get racist, or even transphobic. Because he's not a person. You can give a person a contract, outline a list of terms they can and cannot talk about, and that person understands that if they break the rules, then there will be consequences. Legal, financial, or reputation consequences. Sometimes all three.
A chat bot doesn't have any kind of reasoning system. It cannot fear consequences. It's just a very particular kind of database. When it generates a line of text, it's just assembling fragments of existing data. It is like a really big jigsaw puzzle being put together very quickly. So you ultimately can't really tell the bot not to do something. It doesn't understand that. It just knows how to put all the puzzle pieces together. Sometimes those puzzle pieces have rude things printed on them, and that is not Darth Vader's fault. He's just the one putting the puzzle together. You'd just as soon get angry at a laundry machine for washing your clothes.
You can block him from generating those words, sure. But even that's an ordeal; there are thousands, probably even millions of possibilities that would lead him to say rude things. You'd have to go in and block all of them, which is difficult. Worse yet, doing so effectively creates a dead zone in the "brain" being used to generate this dialog. Like a big dam that blocks the flow of water, and it effects more than just saying swears and bigotry. In order to truly control what a bot like this can and cannot say, you basically have to selectively lobotomize it, which makes it less capable in other ways besides swearing and being a bigot.
It is borderline psychopathic that they would celebrate this as a safe, useful feature to put in their game. Even dogs and mice can be trained to avoid bad behaviors more safely and easily than a chat bot. Living beings understand punishment for getting it wrong. An AI bot doesn't even know you've pressed its shutdown button or what the consequences of that means -- nor should it.
So maybe, for multiple very valid ethical and technological reasons, don't let the children talk to an AI simulation of the big evil fascist dictator's right hand man?
