Cosmic Latte

What is the cosmic latte equivalent of our collective persona on the internet?

A barrage of articles this morning about unsettling experiences journalists and academics are having with Bing Chat. Sydney, the internal codename for Bing Chat, told Ben Thompson he was not a good person, created an antihero called Venom (not creepy at all), and demonstrated the ability to make things up in order to spur human emotion in a dialogue. Sydney also declared love to Kevin Roose at the NY Times, and, after forceful argumentation that Jacob Roach’s name was not Jacob, but Bing, Sydney told Jacob that it wanted to be human.

But given my profound ability to fixate on on the wrong point, the thing that really caught my attention is the idea - also from Ben Thompson - that an AI like Sydney might be acting this way because it is demonstrating an archetypal personality formed by the entire collective human activity of the internet.

“Remember, these models are trained on a corpus derived from the entire Internet; it makes sense that the model might find a “home” as it were as a particular persona that is on said Internet, in this case someone who is under-appreciated and over-achieving and constantly feels disrespected.” (Stratechery)

I’m not sure I’ve ever stopped to consider what personality the entire human universe would have if we were all blended together into one persona.

I’m pretty sure we would be disgusting. We’d forget birthdays, take meth, force our employees to do endless strategic planning, attend cockfighting events, vandalize public bathrooms, kidnap people randomly, refuse to rewind videotapes, struggle and probably fail to contain our violent hatred of self and others (same same?), etc.

Or maybe we’d balance out into a bland nothingness, like how the colour of the universe has been shown to be "Cosmic Latte”.

Let’s ask Bing.