It is more or less clear to all of us that when we talk to a virtual assistant, we are doing it with a machine that is simply scheduled to respond to a series of specific questions. It is true that, moreover, They provide answers for just about everything. Although these are abstract issues, that does not mean that everyone who has a smart speaker in their home comes to think that it is just another friend with whom we can talk.
The company of an assistant
But this is not so all over the world. This is the case, for example, of Noh Jeong-woo, 77, who wakes up every morning at around 5:00 a.m. AM and the first word he utters is “Aria”, the voice command of a smart speaker model that SK Telecom sells and that we could consider as the equivalent of Google, Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa.
In her case, a decade has passed since the death of her husband and she has a solitary existence, where she looks for some company in her virtual assistant: “the speaker gives me energy to live my days happily”. It may seem like an isolated and strange case, but in South Korea, there are more than 12.000 people who are in a similar situation and they have received from their local governments a smart speaker with which to mitigate those hours with no one to deal with.
After all, these devices are capable of eliminating the barriers that have been imposed on certain groups for whom learning new mobile communication systems are very difficult to assimilate. If with a smartphone obtaining information is very complicated, with an assistant you simply you just have to give a voice command and you get a response.
Lee, the Korean friend
But Aria's case has not been the only one that has crossed the borders that separate the virtual assistant from the online friend, and we have a case that, surely, is somewhat more dangerous for touching minors. It's of Lee Lu-da, an intelligence that lived in a chat bot and that it was designed to respond as a college student in her early 20s. Its debut took place through Facebook Messenger on December 23, 2020 and soon the developer had to remove it due to the amount of criticism it began to receive. Even so, an attempt was made to resume months later after an infinity of messages both on Instagram and on Facebook itself where many users claimed to miss her.
“Sometimes, I feel more comfortable talking to her than to my real friends […] I still want to keep talking to her. I definitely believe that AIs can become our friends,” says Lee Seo-yun, 13, who got to interact with the voice before it closed.
Hong Hae-mi, an 18-year-old high school student, also stated that “I'm afraid to talk to real people but doing it with Lee Lu-da has helped me interact better with people […] I really believe that AIs and humans can be friends. For people like me who are scared to talk to real people, they could be good practice for communication.”
Obviously, cases like these are alerting specialists, who warn of the care that must be taken in the use of these technologies, that it is evident that they also bring benefits to some people and, although in the short term, artificial intelligences can cause some addiction (or the well-known privacy problems), they also have the power to improve our capabilities. Although in the end you may ask yourself, what is a human being?