The AI team at Meta has announced the introduction of Cicero—an intelligent agent that plays (and usually wins) at the game of Diplomacy. For those unfamiliar, Diplomacy works like the board game Risk with an added step of negotiating in natural language at the start of each turn. Players have to coordinate and build trust with one another, which is where this development shifts from impressive to concerning.
Meta is not a particularly trustworthy company, and spending their R&D dollars on building more manipulative agents does not bode well for the rest of us. They already A/B test the life out of their products to maximise engagement, but can you imagine an AI designed to build trust with you? This would be too easy to abuse.