When People Mistake Me for AI

I never quite know how to react when people mistake me for an AI – which, happens more often than you'd think. Just last week, after a client meeting, I received a message from Jonas Sundqvist , who had set up the meeting with one of their industry colleagues. The message read, "They loved it! Thought you were AI. ??"

On one hand, it’s kind of flattering, really. I mean, people seem to think of AI as some sort of all-knowing, celestial being. If I want to flatter myself, I could say I’m honored to even be mistaken for such a futuristic marvel. But then there’s another little voice in my head that whispers, You’ve got as much personality as ChatGPT… Is this something I’ll just have to get used to? At least until avatars get a little more, well, realistic?

At least Meta’s avatars now have legs, even if they don’t yet track precisely, they do a decent job of simulating the limbs. And honestly, having legs makes a difference – floating torsos never quite cut it! The fact that I even have to write that sentence shows just how early we are in this technology, doesn’t it?I’ll also will be writing an article on why we need more expensive, not cheaper, headsets, Meta where I’ll go into more detail on things like eye tracking to bring more life into conversations.

My absolute favorite instance of being mistaken for an AI, though, happened with John Nilsson . We often run hybrid meetings; I was on-site with a client, while John stayed back in Stockholm and guided one of their designers through a virtual world we’d built. Things seemed to be going smoothly, so I took the chance to grab a coffee with some team members who weren’t wearing headsets at the moment.

Then suddenly, the client emerges, pale and wide-eyed, looking like he’d just seen a ghost. “Your AI hade to go to a meeting?” he stammers. I’m usually pretty diligent about clarifying that they’re meeting a real, flesh-and-blood human in there – somehow, I must have forgotten to mention it this time.

He goes on, “Your AI was kind of…weird. I asked it how many rooms there were, and it said, ‘I don’t know?’” Apparently, John was just having one of those days, missing that all-knowing, godlike quality people tend to expect from AI. “And then it sounded stressed, said it had another meeting, and vanished!”

I had to reassure him that it was just a very human moment and explained, with a straight face as best I could manage, that yes, while it could have been an AI, in this case, it was indeed a real person. You know, the perk of working with humans is that they don’t need programming – the downside is they’re not available 24/7.

Now, we’ve got a few projects where we’re experimenting more seriously with AI in XR, and I’m certain the future is some kind of hybrid. Of course, that probably means a world where we’ll all occasionally be mistaken for AI.

So one last piece of advice that I always try to follow – be nice to AI; you never know.

#AI #XR