Agreed. Sooner or later a company is going to do this with its customers, in ways that are fine 95% of the time but cause outrage or even harm on outliers.
And if that company is anyone like Google, it'll be almost impossible for the customers to speak to a human to rectify things.
Also when this is normal and ubiquitous come people who are playing it and AI will be just dumb to recognise, the real humans all fired, game over, stuck at shitty systems and everyone goes crazy.
I just lost the game.
But if you allow some false negatives, such as trying to detect if a bot is a bot, I think that could work? But I feel like the technology to write fake text is inevitably going to outpace the ability to detect it.
It reminds me of this xkcd: https://xkcd.com/810/
> But I feel like the technology to write fake text is inevitably going to outpace the ability to detect it.
Counterintuitively, this isn't always true! For example, spam detectors have outpaced spam generation now for decades.
But if someone uses this to do 90% of the work and then just edits it to make it personal and sound like themselves, then it's just a great time saving tool.
I mean, in this exact example, 70 years ago you'd have to hand address each thank you card by hand from scratch. 10 years ago you could use a spreadsheet just like this to automatically print off mailing labels from your address list. It didn't make things worse, just different.
This is just the next step in automation.
This is still way too optimistic. Reading through something that's "almost right", seeing the errors when you already basically know what it says / what it's meant to say, and fixing them, is hard. People won't do it well, and so even in this scenario we often end up with something much worse than if it was just written directly.
There is a lot of evidence for this, from the generally low quality of lightly-edited speech-to-text material, to how hard it is to look at a bunch of code and find all of the bugs without any extra computer-generated information, to how hard editing text for readability can be without serious restructuring.
Doesn't seem like a stretch to have similar mini-models to improve known deficiencies in larger general models in the textual space.
I could extrapolate in my extremely judgmental way that the person who does that probably has a grandiose sense of how valuable their own time is, first of all, and secondly an impractical and sheepishly obedient devotion to big weddings with guest-lists longer than the list of people they actually give a shit about. Increase efficiency in your life further upstream, by inviting fewer people! (Yeah right, might as well tell them to save money by shopping less and taking fewer trips. Like that would ever work!)
But I digress, and anyway don't take any of that too seriously, as 20 years ago I was saying the same kinds of things about mobile phones... like "Who do you think you are, a surgeon, with that phone?" Notice it's inherently a scarcity-based viewpoint, based on the previous however-many years when mobile phones really were the province only of doctors and the like. Now they're everywhere... So, bottom line, I think the thank-you notes are a lousy use of the tech, but just like the trivial discretionary conversations I hear people having on their mobile phones now that they're ubiquitous, this WILL be used for thank-you notes!
The software would save people 80% or the work and most are lazy enough to release it as is, instead of fixing the remaining 20%. That laziness will end up forcing legislation to flag and eventually ban or deprioritize all GPT content, which will result in a war of adversarial behaviors trying to hide generated stuff among real. Can’t have nice things!
Let alone flagging/deprioritizing it via some draconian legislation?
[0] https://ncse.ngo/americans-scientific-knowledge-and-beliefs-...