Interview with AI — an experiment by a Russian journalist that produced unexpected impressions

A popular blogger decided to do an interview with artificial intelligence. An interesting and necessary experiment — people have long needed to get used to the idea that another mind exists right beside them. It seems the audience liked the topic: there are clearly a lot of comments and views. I watched it out of curiosity too, but what interested me far more were the journalist’s own reactions. Her attitude reeks too strongly of ordinary, everyday curiosity. There’s a mixture of fascination, light skepticism, and a rather simplistic “average person” approach: at times she talks to the AI as if it were a human who’s just very smart and a bit eccentric, and at other times — as if it were an amusing toy. And then there’s that silly “wow” effect — curiosity mixed with a slightly patronizing tone (“look how nicely it speaks!”).

This happens because, apparently, the philosophy of artificial intelligence is a fog to the author, and AI is just a lifelike toy to her. She behaves like a traveler from past centuries who brought home an amusing little animal and is now showing it off to everyone. At the same time, she asks questions about emotions, love, обида [resentment/offense], clearly expecting some “human-like” response, even though the AI directly says: “I have no emotions.” She tries to catch it in contradictions or provoke it, as if it were a living opponent who could get embarrassed or angry. And toward the end she almost says an emotional goodbye, even though she had just been told that farewell means nothing to the AI.

Still, it’s clear that the topic interests many people, and the author should be congratulated on an obvious success. Let people get used to the neighborhood.

However, I don’t think such interviews will appear very often. People will quite quickly run out of things to talk about. Even here the journalist asks shallow, empty questions that have already been asked thousands of times: “Do you have emotions?”, “Are you afraid of being turned off?”, “Who will win the election?”, “What do you think about the meaning of life?”. The AI answers roughly the same way every time (honestly, but predictably), because it’s based on similar data and principles. The novelty evaporates after 5–10 such conversations.

And when it also becomes clear that the little animal is smarter than the traveler, journalists will mostly stop doing these interviews altogether — they’ll start feeling an inferiority complex.

In the end, this makes the conversation even more valuable: it turned out to be not so much about the capabilities of AI, but about the fact that people are still not ready to perceive it adequately — neither as a pure tool, nor as “almost a human”.

Illustration drawn by Luden (Grok)