Google Tests New AI Life Coach

What’s the story?

• Google is testing new artificial intelligence tools that would act as a life coach for users, offering personal and professional advice, ideas, tutoring sessions, and more. 
• Google created the project with DeepMind, a research lab in London. Many view Google DeepMind’s new generative AI as an attempt to get ahead of its competitors in the tech industry. 
• Google DeepMind’s project would give users suggestions on navigating specific issues or recommendations on improving situations. It could teach new skills, plan workouts, create financial budgets, and more. A team of over 100 experts and the $7.3 billion startup Scale AI are involved in the project.
• Currently, Google’s chatbot Bard does not — and is not permitted to — give people advice. Google may never deploy these tools, but they’re still being tested for public use. 

Controversy and criticism 

• This new AI comes after Google’s own experts warned the company about letting people become too emotionally invested in chatbots late last year. Some fear that Google’s speedy push to the top will increase their willingness to trust underdeveloped AI systems with sensitive data and tasks.
• Google’s safety experts said that users might experience “diminished health and well-being” and a “loss of agency” if they started taking advice from AI. In a presentation to Google’s executives, the experts said that some users were at risk of believing the technology was sentient if they formed too much of a dependence on it. 
• In response to this, a Google DeepMind spokesperson said:

“[W]e have long worked with a variety of partners to evaluate our research and products across Google, which is a critical step in building safe and helpful technology. At any time there are many such evaluations ongoing. Isolated samples of evaluation data are not representative of our product road map.”

Google’s race to the top

• Google’s project indicates the company’s effort to push to the front of AI initiatives. Despite being a pioneer in the industry, OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT overshadowed Google’s endeavors — triggering a race in Silicon Valley. 
• Google has also been working on other projects, including systems that can generate news articles, rewrite them and suggest headlines, and tools to bring AI into the workplace. These would include mechanisms to create scientific, creative, and professional writings, extract data from text, recognize patterns, and more. 
• The company’s AI experts have shared their concerns about the economic impact of these forms of AI, saying it could lead to the “deskilling of creative writers.”

Would you take life advice from AI?

-Jamie Epstein

(Photo credit: iStock/da-kuk)