Together with Bing Chat and ChatGPT, artificial intelligence chatbots are rapidly affecting the whole world with their abilities. But the problems such as the blunders of these artificial intelligence chatbots and the wrong information they provide can be seen in a remarkable way. Although the interactions with these chatbots are limited at the moment, it can be predicted that there will be work to overcome and perhaps even remove these limits before long.
Well, do you know that a movie predicted the rise of artificial intelligence chatbots 40 years ago? WarGames, published in 1983…
The film, which was a huge box office revenue and critically acclaimed at the time, was notable for introducing the concept of hacking computer systems, as well as being one of the first films to address the rise of personal computing in the 1980s, and gained a prominent place in film history. It was said that then-US President Ronald Reagan also watched the movie, and after discussions with lawmakers and advisors, the government began making rules for computer security.
In the movie, Matthew Broderick’s young hacker character David Lightman thinks he has hacked a video game publisher, but actually manages to connect to WOPR, the new NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) supercomputer. Unknown to both David and NORAD at the time, WOPR has a rough chatbot AI interface named Joshua, accessed by a backdoor password.
David starts chatting with “Joshua” on his keyboard. Joshua thinks David is Stephen Falken, the original creator of artificial intelligence. Next, the AI asks David the famous question: “Shall we play a game?” Having already discovered the list of Joshua’s games such as chess, checkers and the much more remarkable Global Thermonuclear War, David initially tries to be persuaded by “Joshua” to play chess, but as you can imagine, David wants to play Global Thermonuclear War.
From this point on, the plot is triggered for the rest of the movie. “Joshua” in WOPR begins to show NORAD personnel untrue Soviet military actions. Of course, NORAD, unaware of the fact that WOPR has “Joshua” artificial intelligence inside, believes that what appears on its screens are real Soviet military activities, and events are developing. It can easily be said that the film is still valid and has an important place and subject in many respects today.
It’s not hard to see a connection and similarity between WarGames’ “Joshua” and today’s Bing, ChatGPT and other chatbot AIs. Of course, as far as we know, there is no AI chatbot yet connected to national defense systems. But the movie brings up some of the very real dangers that artificial intelligence can pose to humanity as it continues to evolve and grow.
It can be indisputably accepted that artificial intelligence has the capacity to make our lives much easier in many areas. But there are tons of movies and TV shows where AI can derail the way Bing chatbot AI does on a very limited scale, from Joshua to HAL-9000 to Skynet and more. While these examples may seem like only fantasy, they now have the potential to become reality with a little mistake or carelessness.
Let’s hope tech giants like Microsoft and OpenAI don’t create an AI to start World War III when they just want to play games.
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