There are so many viral AI chatbots that you can’t even trust that one of them is real anymore.
In December, a group of Danish researchers unveiled life2vec, an AI chatbot that could theoretically predict when a person will die. The group’s findings were published in a paper and the models have been thoroughly explained in a FAQ on the life2vec website.
Crucially, the life2vec chatbot is not available to the public, leading to a surge of fake entities claiming to use it.
“We are aware of social media accounts and at least one fraudulent website claiming to be associated with the life2vec model,” the life2vec website states. “We are not affiliated with these or any other entities that claim to use our technology.”
This is such a good encapsulation of what’s wrong with the internet today. Scientists made a thing that seems to at least have some real know-how behind it. Smartly, they kept it out of public hands. But then people made fake versions of it — and one of those deceptive copies is currently above the real life2vec website in Google search results, prompting life2vec to issue warnings about it.
And that’s before you even get to how weird it is to ask an AI chatbot when you’ll die. Good grief.
