This is a comment text. The author is responsible for the analysis and positioning in the text.
Open AI, the company behind Chat GPT, wants to know everything you do. This could be a somewhat cynical interpretation of the company’s new investment in bringing the chatbot into our homes.
The last decade has been characterized by increasingly extensive data collection about us as individuals. Tech companies have mapped more and more of what we do online through a complex network of tracking tools, creating vast indices of our lives and habits – often with the aim of selling us things or training AI tools. Retired Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff has called the data economy that emerged in her wake surveillance capitalism.
But it still existsBelieve it or not, moments of the day when we don’t focus our attention on a screen. This stands out clearly in the eyes of the companies that build their wealth on knowing what we do.
Amazon found the solution in its smart speakers, which it launched in 2014. By integrating the AI assistant Alexa into our homes, the company was able to connect with us even when the phone is in our pocket and the laptop lid is closed.
Data glasses, smartwatches and various gadgets with AI assistants that we have to carry with us in everyday life fulfill the same function. They bridge the gap between physical and digital reality. For the companies that sell them, this means double revenue, both in the form of units sold and from a flood of new, previously unavailable data.
However, so far there have been such some kind of agreement. If you put an Echo speaker on the bookshelf, Amazon swears (in its impenetrable terms of service) that it won’t listen to you until you activate it with a voice command – “Hey Alexa!”
It is not waterproof. It happens that smart gadgets still record things they aren’t supposed to, and it also happens that video and voice recordings are much more widespread than the user understands.
This week, Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten revealed how recordings from Meta’s smart glasses are sent to a data factory in Kenya for analysis. Employees sit there and comment on the videos so that they can be used to train AI models.
Employees say they saw everything from bathroom visits to sexual acts, things that glasses wearers probably never imagined a stranger on the other side of the world would study in detail.
What Open AI wants Take it one step further. They want to completely break the conventions of when smart devices listen and when they don’t.
The company now has a unit of around 200 people who work on hardware development together with Apple’s former design guru Jony Ive (who helped design iconic products such as the Imac, iPod and iPhone). Work is underway there to bring Chat GPT into the physical world, and the first product appears to be a smart speaker in the Amazon spirit, due to launch next year, according to information from the often accurate tech magazine The Information.
When Ive spoke with company founder Sam Altman last fall about what they want to accomplish, the duo painted a vision of an AI helper that is “context-aware”; It must understand itself when it is time to offer advice, reminders and updates. A robot that reads the room.
To do that it is necessary it’s in the game. If the information in the information is correct, this is done through cameras and microphones that are constantly active. It sees you and it hears you all the time.
The tech industry sells this concept with the buzzword Ambient intelligencewhere the “intelligence” is integrated into the environment rather than focused on a phone or computer.
Of course, one can argue that an AI assistant that constantly knows what you are doing may be more helpful. It’s just as easy to say that such a device can do literally everything you do at home, filling the blind spot on the data map that is our screen-free moments.
It is, to use a familiar analogy, a bit like this Black mirror-Section.
Read more:
“In half an hour, the AI solved what I had been trying to do my entire career.”
Publishers and media support the government’s investment in an AI language model
Here is the social network where only AI robots speak
