While everyone continues to worry about the mimicking powers of AI – and how that, by itself, will lead to the end of humans and of the world, not necessarily in that anthropocentric order – we can’t help but raise our glasses of morning nimbu paani to the person who called up US Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, pretending to be Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The very non-artificially intelligent pranksters are Vladimir Kuznetsov and Alexei Stolyarov, reportedly two Valdimir Putin fans. Or so we are told. The conversation between faux Zelenskyy – who may, at some level, appreciate the prank since he was once a stand-up comedian – and Powell involved questions like, ‘In your opinion, which countries also suffered more from recent political situations?’ to which the Fed boss answered rather sincerely, ‘I would say not the United States. We have our own energy here so it’s really not us… You know better than I do, but it’s going to be… Poland and the eastern European countries that are… close to Ukraine.’
Pretending to be someone other than oneself by itself is fun. It becomes great fun when one manages to pull off the stunt by mimicking a famous person. And the coup de grace is delivered when a famous person is duped into thinking that the person on the other end is also a famous person. More power to ChatVladimirAlexei.
