Celeste Rodriguez Louro does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this art

The unspoken rule of conversation that explains why AI chatbots feel so human

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2024-11-26 00:00:05

Celeste Rodriguez Louro does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Earlier this year, a Hong Kong finance worker was tricked into paying US$25 million to scammers who had used deepfake technology to pretend to be the company’s chief financial officer in a video conference call. Thinking the images on screen were his colleagues, the financier authorised the multi-million dollar transfer to fraudsters posing as friends.

It’s a dramatic example, but the bamboozled office worker was far from alone in being fooled by generative AI. This technology, which relies heavily on large language models trained on vast amounts of data to learn and predict the patterns of language, has become increasingly widespread since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022.

How can we explain why some people who interact with generative AI chatbots are so readily convinced they are having a conversation with a kind of person? The answer may lie in the rules of conversation itself – and how they are deeply ingrained in the way we interact with the world.

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