Old joke

Old joke:

“Day 19 of the experiment, I have successfully conditioned my master to give me food, smile, and write in his book every time I drool.” – Pavlov’s Dog

The free-play phase of Altman’s AI attack seems to be standard sales practice, which can be benign or not. Duane Jones calls it Sampling. Send the customer a free or cheap sample and let him find out whether he likes it or not. After he’s more or less addicted, charge more.

After reading several stories from those samplers on Reddit and Substack, it’s clear that Altman has an opposite purpose which wasn’t possible with products like soup or drugs.

The samplers are experimenting with all sorts of strategies to get the desired (often unorthodox) response from the AI. They’re “learning” how to make it run, but more importantly the AI is learning how people strategize and interact.

Altman uses these experiments to suck even more of the soul from humans.