Sandra, Gimlet Media,
HOW do we really know who is on the other end of conversations with digital assistants like Siri and Alexa? Just who is listening to our requests and questions, or accessing the vast troves of personal information we have given over to these companies? And does that kind of access affect both those handing over their details and the employees on the other end?
The podcast Sandra weaves these debates about ethics in technology into an engaging audio drama. The premise of the show is that a woman, Helen (played by Alia Shawkat), takes a job in which she pretends to be a virtual assistant named Sandra (voiced mechanically by Kristen Wiig), which has been created by a tech company called Orbital Teledynamics.
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All the 鈥淪andras鈥�, as the company names the humans it pays to pretend to be artificial intelligences, are assigned a specialised topic to cover. To Helen鈥檚 confusion, she is assigned birds, but other Sandras she meets specialise in everything from the Enlightenment philosophers to movies starring Morgan Freeman.
She quickly finds that, while her personal life is a mess, as Sandra she can solve any problem, from buying doves for a pagan wedding to picking canary wallpaper for a nursery.
Early on, she and her supervisor Dustin (played by Ethan Hawke) bond over their love of being Sandra, describing it as a 鈥渟uperpower鈥�. Yet as is fairly usual when superpowers are involved, wielding them is nothing like as simple as it first appears. Dustin tells Helen to 鈥渢rust the system鈥�, reassuring her that Orbital wouldn鈥檛 put her in a situation it didn鈥檛 think she could handle, but she hits both highs and lows as she answers the questions put to her by users.
While the idea of a human pretending to be an AI may sound like a bit of a stretch, it is actually a real phenomenon. From start-ups to established outfits, companies have rolled out 鈥淎I鈥� tools that later turn out to be powered by human intelligence, where people did everything from chatting with customers to transcribing personal information, such as receipts.
The humans performing these tasks are often bored and frustrated, to the point of saying they are looking forward to being replaced by machines. And the humans interacting with this pseudo-AI have had to resort to developing their own tests to figure out whether they really are talking to a human or a machine.
All this is part of a bigger picture among tech companies. For many years it has been acceptable to roll out unfinished products and reel in investors by overstating a product鈥檚 capabilities. This is a strategy that has been seen in companies like Theranos, which made false claims about its blood-testing technology in order to raise millions of dollars from investors.
鈥淭he customers ask the Sandras questions they probably wouldn鈥檛 dream of asking another person鈥�
Sandra also picks up on another interesting trend in AI, something that is one of the attractions of the technology: people interact with it very differently than they do with other people. For example, when the US military used an AI therapist to screen homecoming service personnel for post-traumatic stress disorder, they found that it was more effective at getting people to discuss their symptoms honestly than either a human interview or a written questionnaire.
The customers in the show ask Helen and her fellow Sandras questions they probably wouldn鈥檛 dream of asking another person, like whether it is possible to get an allergy just by thinking about a food. But they also contact her just to have someone to talk to (or, in one case, to have someone for their parrot to talk to).
Unsurprisingly, some of the humans that Helen talks to as Sandra aren鈥檛 being straightforward about who they are and what they want either. Some do it to abuse her, a pattern we see when humans interact with AI in the real world. Others turn out to be doing it for more duplicitous reasons with more serious consequences.
What does Sandra have to say about a world that is full of AIs pretending to be human and humans pretending to be AIs? Well, you will have to listen to the whole show to find out, but it comes down to this: sooner or later, your lies will catch up with you, whether you are a human, an AI or something in between.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淪earching for Sandra鈥�
