1 June 2024 by Mondo2.0

Synthetic Personalities: is what we find online still our own work?

The “first” version of the Internet, the one that captured my personal interest, was characterized above all by the possibility of intervening, of “posting”, of exposing oneself publicly. This great space for participation, this agora, seemed to us — or rather, seemed to me — the right key to involving everyone, an alternative to the “usual” media protagonists.
The Internet of today, only a few years later, is significantly different, not only because social media users have failed to understand its potential, ways of use and consequences, but rather because of the stratospheric increase in the information being published and therefore in entropy.

Our liquid society, immersed in the digital world, has progressively turned into something dense, compact, impossible to navigate, impossible to trace back to the source.

Fake news, fake comments and false social media accounts represent the first steps along this path in which information is cloned, follows thousands of streams, transforms, regenerates and becomes confused with other similar content.

Social platforms such as Instagram and TikTok are flooded with automated accounts and comments; in these cases, automation aims to capture interest, prolong the user experience and generate revenue. It is no coincidence that the hours we spend every day on our electronic devices continue to increase.

The “first” version of the Internet placed the “node”, namely the person, at the centre of the Web, in relation to everyone else; despite many contradictions, risks, errors and excesses, in the first release of the Internet the user was at the “centre”, the protagonist of what was published.

In this second phase, “person-to-person” communication is evolving towards a “person-to-software” communication model in which the software, as mentioned at the beginning, is nothing other than a synthetic personality that automatically produces or replicates content.

Synthetic personalities are digital entities, software, that simulate human behaviour. Agents whose task is to engage, converse, entertain and persuade; in practice, they attempt to replicate human intelligence and behaviour within digital spaces and services.

The great, obvious difference compared with the previous generation of software services lies in the ability to generate responses and behaviours in relation to the user’s actual needs and desires, in an “intelligent” way and consistently with the responses and stimuli provided by the user/customer.

A synthetic personality is much more than software that generates results based on repetitive processes or performs complex calculations; it is a tool that uses its ability to retrieve information, while respecting initial conditions set “by someone”, to generate content following patterns of thought similar to those of the user; it then analyses actual interest and generates new content that is even more closely aligned.

Every synthetic personality has a stratospheric amount of information at its disposal, not to mention the ability, in the new A.I. services (or should we say the “new personalities”), to interpret images, learn from their own mistakes, misunderstandings and their still frequent hallucinations.

“Synthetic” social media accounts, bots and generated fake news replicated online lead us to think that today the majority of content produced on the Internet is not the work of humans but is generated automatically.
This explains the information density found online.

This new synthetic generation obviously opens up important ethical issues.

The idea of establishing a personal and emotional relationship with a synthetic personality, to the point of reading or conversing for many hours, or even being able to fall in love with a bot, raises various questions concerning human nature, social interaction and technological ethics.

Human beings are capable of developing emotional bonds with a wide range of entities, both real and imaginary: deities, characters from books or even video games. The possibility that someone might develop an emotional bond with a synthetic personality is far from unlikely, especially if it is designed to simulate convincing human behaviour attentive to our interests.

Bots, conversational agents and A.I. services have, and increasingly will have, the task of entertaining and persuading us.

In this two-way “person <-> synthetic person” relationship there is a decisive factor: we are willing to invest our time provided that what we see and read increasingly follows our own patterns of thought. We love news that “thinks like us”; it does not matter whether it is true, false or partially false, what matters is that it casts those we do not like in a bad light and reinforces our convictions. We seek approval online.

An immense flow of information that replicates information “ad personam”, adapting it to our intimate convictions — convictions that are not too secret, given that we accept every cookie notice.

Three synthetic forms are of interest to us in this article:

• Forms of conversation and entertainment: Conversational agents are increasingly at the centre of online help/support services, guiding users through everyday tasks, a booking, a purchase. Behind this new generation of services lies a completely new phenomenon, in which person-to-person interaction via the Internet is replaced by person-to-machine interaction, where from a social point of view the machine has, and will progressively have, an equal role. We will converse with, confide in and increasingly rely on synthetic personalities.
• Forms of information: A phenomenon that is already widespread and, to tell the truth, already worrying, in which this software generates news of every kind and in every quantity. If you have read news on social media today, it is very likely that it was written, improved or personalised by an A.I., or simply enriched with elements that appeal to you. The news we read is increasingly close to our way of thinking, is personalised and, probably, in many cases only partially consistent with reality.
• Forms of online socialisation: Social media accounts created through bots, which aggregate and reassemble information and videos taken from elsewhere, are increasingly common. Automated comments capable of influencing every line of judgement are equally frequent. Social Networks are already crowded with synthetic personalities. A large part of the web trends that characterise social networks today are synthetic.

This article is written in the first person; in the first sentence I speak of “my personal interest”, but am “I” a physical person or a synthetic personality? I challenge you to work it out; you probably will not succeed because online there is now no difference at all between a “personality” and a “synthetic personality”.

Mondoduepuntozero