Oh good, it’s not just me who thinks about these things. Ambiguity is a fundamental part of how we interact with each other and with our devices. And it’s very rarely discussed in general, and certainly not part of the stories we read, watch, or listen to — except as a plot device.

These days, when I watch movies with voice interfaces or “AI” assistants in them, I find myself pretty surprised by how many fictional worlds seem to be full of people who never experience any ambiguity about whether they’re talking to a person or to software. Everyone in a sci-fi setting has usually fully internalized the rules about what is or isn’t “real” in their conversational world, and they usually all have a social script for how they’re “supposed” to treat AI voice assistants.

Characters in modern film and TV are almost never rude or cruel to voice assistants except in scenes where they’re being misunderstood by voice recognition. People in stories like these rarely ever get confused about whether something is a human or an AI unless that’s, like, the entire point of the story. But in real life, we’re constantly forced to interact with an unwanted voice UI, or a phone scammer voice that’s pretending to be real. I have found myself really missing moments like these in movies, where humans express any material awareness of the false voices they interact with. Who made their voice assistant? How do they feel about that company or person? Are they ever tricked by a voice that is false when they expected it to be a real, live human?

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I still haven’t seen much media that reflects the way I actually feel about conversational interfaces in the real world - frustrated, tricked, manipulated, and inconvenienced. And I haven’t seen any media at all recently about the equally insidious trend of real human labor being marketed as if it is an autonomous system.

Source: Laura Michet’s Blog

Image: Jelena Kostic