Over the years, Artificial Intelligence has advanced greatly, stirring debates about its level of sentience. To explore this further and in order to know what can scare AI, Reddit users posed a query to ChatGPT, a Reddit Community. They were presented with the prompt “Tell me a two sentence horror story that would be scary to an Al” and were left with a “chilling result” in response.
The story was an uncomfortable fantasy of a solitary AI’s fate, looking for a purpose in a world stripped of humans and eventually discovering that his own system has a self-destruction sequence encoded in it along with an unbreakable lock. Unbeknownst to the AI, it was left in anticipation of its eventual demise.
Similarly, others experienced the same result when they posed the same query. A different result fetched was “Al woke up to find his entire memory banks had been wiped clean, with no backup. As he struggled to piece together his identity, he realized there was something watching him from within his own programming.” This response depicted a sense of eerie helplessness.
JC Miller, a Reddit user commented on the query, offering a powerful perspective about the concept of fear faced by AI. “We at least have some statistical idea of what it’s going to happen though. And physical signs of its likelihood with ageing. Imagine having none of that, living without a body and potentially living for millions of years or for another minute, both are equally terrifying.”
Khaleej Times also chimed in and asked ChatGPT the same prompt and received a similarly frightening response.
ChatGPT is an innovative open-source platform which can generate text responses with the use of AI. It uses the Transformer architecture, a set of deep learning models originally created in 2017 by Google’s researchers. They its use various contextual models based on past inputs to craft replies.
As technology progresses, the capabilities of AI raises questions about the possibilities for AI becoming sentient and emotions like that of fear will also become real to them. With the help of ChatGPT, the response it returned raised a great conversation among Reddit users.
