Currently, talking to a face is the ultimate guarantee that you are communicating with a human (and on a subconscious level makes you try to relate, empathise, etc.). If humanoid robot technology eventually surpasses the Uncanny Valley, discovering that I’m talking to a humanoid with an LLM and that my intuitions had been betrayed would undermine the instinctive trust I give to the other party when I see a human face. This would degrade my social interactions across the board, because I’d live in constant suspicion that the humans I was talking to weren’t actually human.
It is for this reason I think it should be the law that humanoid robots must be clearly differentiated from humans. Or at least that people should have the right to opt out from encountering realistic-looking humanoids.
I have no idea what the actual origin story for Fallout’s Brotherhood of Steel is, but I’d at least place OP’s post as a strong candidate.
In all seriousness, if it ever gets out of uncanny valley, then yeah that’s a major transparency issue. The problem at that point becomes, even with laws in place to prevent it, who’s to say those will actually be followed? It’ll cause the same issues that deepfakes are causing now, but off-screen in real time. That would have crazy-bad implications for politics, security, social engineering, market manipulation…
Yep. But then I don’t get why there are efforts to make a realistic robotic human face.
(Edit: ok I do understand one reason – just as a challenge and to prove it’s possible, but I’m not sure that justifies doing it given the consequences)