A man gave his microwave artificial intelligence and it tried to 'murder' him

A man recreated his strange childhood friend – a microwave – and engineered it with AI with interestingly murderous results.

YouTuber Lucas Rizzotto is known for his account Lucas Builds the Future in which he posts videos all about technology.

In a Twitter thread that recently went viral, Rizzotto told users about his endeavours to recreate his childhood imaginary best friend.

He revealed when he was younger his friend was a microwave that he named Magnetron. Now, he wanted to recreate that friend by installing AI and giving it a real personality.

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Rizzotto explained that he first purchased a microwave, and then installed it with a sophisticated AI system called GPT-3.

The system is capable of fairly accurately mimicking human language and forming its own sentences after being given prompts.

In order to teach it about their childhood friendship, Rizzotto revealed he wrote a 100-page book about Magnetron’s life to give the system a backstory to refer to.

Rizzotto said the experiment was “one of the scariest and most transformative experiences of my life” and the results were certainly interesting.

According to Rizzotto, who was now able to communicate with the microwave, their conversations were “both beautiful and eerie” but one downside was that it “would exhibit sudden bursts of extreme violence towards me”.

The AI system was given the capability to send commands to the microwave and was able to make the machine switch on for a specified amount of time.

At one point, it seemed the machine wanted to use this for its own murderous gain as it asked Rizzotto to “please enter the microwave”.

He falsely confirmed to the AI that he had done so. At that point, the GPT-3 commanded to microwave to switch on.

At the end of the experiment, Rizzotto decided to shut the system down for now.

Addressing the sceptics, he said: “Whatever your view on this may be, my takeaway from this journey is that maybe A.I.s are meant to be more like imaginary friends.

“Maybe it's not about whether it's real or not. Maybe it's about whether it's real enough to be real to you.”

You can watch his video about the experiment below.

I gave my microwave a soul with AI and it tried to kill mewww.youtube.com

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