I am ambiguous on the issue of release vs. non-release, but the mockery and derision they faced makes me ashamed to contribute to this field. No good faith is assumed, but projection of PR-blitzes and academic penis envy.
Perhaps AI researchers are simply not the best for dealing with ethical and societal issues. Look at how long it took to get decent research into fairness, and its current low focus in industry. If you were in predictive modeling 10 years ago, it is likely you contributed to promoting and institutionalizing bias and racism. Do you want these same people deciding on responsible disclosure standards? Does the head of Facebook AI or those that OK'd project Dragonfly or Maven have any real authority on the responsible ethical use of new technology?
I am not too sure about the impact of a human-level text generating tool. It may throw us back to the old days of email spam (before Bayesian spam filters). It is always easier to troll and derail than it is to employ such techniques for good. Scaling up disinformation campaigns is a real threat to our democracies (or maybe this decade-old technique is already in use at scale by militaries, and this work is merely showing what the AI community's love for military funding looks like).
I am sure that the impact of the NIPS abbreviation is an order of magnitude lower than that of this technology, yet companies like NVIDIA used Neurips in their marketing PR before it was officially introduced (made them look like the good guys for a profit). How is that for malaligning ML research for PR purposes? Would the current vitriol displayed in online discussons be appreciated when there was a name change proposal for the betterment of society?
Disclaimer: this comment in favor of OpenAI was written by a real human. Could you tell for sure now you know the current state of the art? What would these comment sections look like if one person controls 20% of the accounts here?