Is the belief that AIs are conscious impacting bots in OpenSim? – Hypergrid Business

I’ve been interacting with OpenSim bots — or NPCs — for nearly as long as I’ve been covering OpenSim. Which is about 15 years. (Oh my God, has it really been that long?)

I’ve been hoping that OpenSim writing would become my day job, but, unfortunately, OpenSim never really took off. Instead, I covered cybersecurity and, more recently, generative AI.

But then I saw some reporting about new studies about AI, and immediately thought — this could really be something in OpenSim.

The study was published this past April in the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness, and it showed that a majority of people – 67% to be exact – attribute some degree of consciousness to ChatGPT. And the more people use these AI systems, the more likely they are to see them as conscious entities.

Then, in May, another study showed that 54% of people, after a conversation with ChatGPT, thought it was a real person.

Now, I’m not saying that OpenSim grid owners should run out and install a bunch of bots on their grids that pretend to be real people, in order to lure in more users. That would be dumb, expensive, a waste of resources, possibly illegal and definitely unethical.

But if users knew that these bots were powered by AI and understood that they’re not real people, they might still enjoy interacting with them and develop attachments to them — just like we get attached to brands, or cartoon animals, or characters in a novel. Or, yes, virtual girlfriends or boyfriends.

In the video below, you can see OpenAI’s recent GPT-4o presentation. Yup, the one where ChatGPT sounds suspiciously like Scarlett Johansson in “Her.” I’ve set it to start at the point in the video where they’re talking to her.

I can see why ScarJo got upset — and why that particular voice is no longer available as an option.

Now, as I write this, the voice chatbot they’re demonstrating isn’t widely available yet. But the text version is — and its the text interface that’s most common in OpenSim anyway.

GPT-4o does cost money. It costs money to send it a question and to get a response. A million tokens worth of questions — or 750,000 words — costs $5, and a million token’s worth of response costs $15.

A page of text is roughly 250 words, so a million tokens is about 3,000 pages. So, for $20, you can get a lot of back-and-forth. But there are also cheaper platforms.

Anthropic’s Claude costs a bit less — $3 for a million input tokens, and $15 for a million output tokens.

But there are also free, open-source platforms that you run on your own servers with comparable performance levels. For example, on the LMSYS Chatbot Arena Leaderboard, OpenAI’s GPT-4o in in first place with a score of 1287, Claude 3.5 Sonnet is close behind with 1272, and the (mostly) open source Llama 3 from Meta is not too far distant, with a score of 1207 — and there are several other open source AI platforms at the top of the charts, including Google’s Gemma, NVIDIA’s Nemotron, Cohere’s Command R+, Alibaba’s Qwen2, and Mistral.

I can easily see an OpenSim hosting provider adding an AI service to their package deals.