The technology is fascinating to play with, but I have no idea who would be excited about the future it will create where everything is polluted by it.
My point is, ChatGPT is just another step in a process which has been going on for decades. The simulation of reality it creates is just another step removed from what we're used to, but what we've become accustomed to wasn't reality anyway, even if it seems like a faithful copy of it.
"The map is not the territory."
Lies have existed since the dawn of civilization, so the difference doesn't seem significant, at all.
Russia and other authoritarian regimes currently employee thousands of people around the world to produce realistic lies on the internet. This is not an insignificant expense.
With a tool like ChatGPT, they could scale this to seem like millions of people instead of just thousands. The web could be 99% bots and most of its users would have a hard time telling.
The near-term effect is that sites like reddit and HN are going to get a lot worse in terms of quality content.
ChatGPT can, in your example, play the role of a writer and may even be good at it someday. But that’s on brand for ChatGPT as a language model. Could be immensely useful.
So far so good! But it starts to get funny from here. Where some people conflate the LLM with what it’s not. An agent with “Human Level Artificial Intelligence”.
The problem is that chatgpt will lie to your face and tell you it isn’t lying.
So will the news media and I mean all from the right-wing drivel at Fox/Newsmax to MSNBC, and CNN.
Tucker Carlson actually won a lawsuit regarding this because it was deemed that he was quote: 'an entertainer' NOT a 'news person'. So, basically an actor playing a news caster, and a large swath of society cannot see the difference.
MSNBC, would say anything to make Bernie look bad so he'd drop down in polls, CNN as well. If you ask any of these people point blank to list the lies they've told on camera, under oath, you'd get a lot of '5ths'.
Hell, I mostly get my news from just headlines on reddit/hn simply because reading past the headline usually leads to a lot of opinions, and biases. If I want opinions/biases, I'd rather read comments from people who DID read the article, as they're usually way more informed on the subject than the actual author.
Even without those fingers on the scale for good or ill, all ChatGPT can do is generate text from the prompt. It doesn't "know" things. It cannot process meaning. It can only produce likely text given its training text.
The problem is in our anthropomorphizing the tool. It is a tool, and people who regularly use tools know their limitations and appropriate applications. We're making the tool available to a general public that has no idea what the limitations are. The public is told this is "AI" (it isn't), and they're thinking C3PO not automated MadLibs.
The real thing this is going to do is drastically increase the noise, drowning out signal in our day to day lives. Nothing will be trustworthy information, because all of it will get washed through these generators.
If AI will become the "Master Persuader" Scott Adams babbles about. An "all knowing" AI can be a spawn of a new religion.
In Jonestown, a fringe 70s cult, had its devotes drink poison Kool aid. 900 people died. No reason that an AI religion can't beat those numbers.
Human's respond to Authority figures. They just want someone else to figure it out, and tell them what to do. Think how many ideologies humanity fell for, puffed up by pseudo intellectuals and fantastical promises of Utopias on Earth. Not even tested theories, or things easily countered with world experience of human behaviour. Yet people went along. All they needed is just a little stick and carrot and an authority figure in uniform to tell them what to do.
SEO spammers and Taboola I assume it will fully automate their workflow
> Other people say, and I think this is a widely used rationalization, that fundamentally the tools we work on are "mere" tools; This means that whether they get use for good or evil depends on the person who ultimately buys them and so on.
> There's nothing bad about working in computer vision, for example. Computer vision may very well some day be used to heal people who would otherwise die. Of course, it could also be used to guide missiles, cruise missiles for example, to their destination, and all that. You see, the technology itself is neutral and value-free and it just depends how one uses it. And besides -- consistent with that -- we can't know, we scientists cannot know how it is going to be used. So therefore we have no responsibility.
> Well, that is false. It is true that a computer, for example, can be used for good or evil. It is true that a helicopter can be used as a gunship and it can also be used to rescue people from a mountain pass. And if the question arises of how a specific device is going to be used, in what I call an abstract ideal society, then one might very well say one cannot know.
> But we live in a concrete society, [and] with concrete social and historical circumstances and political realities in this society, it is perfectly obvious that when something like a computer is invented, then it is going to be adopted will be for military purposes. It follows from the concrete realities in which we live, it does not follow from pure logic. But we're not living in an abstract society, we're living in the society in which we in fact live.
-- Joseph Weizenbaum, http://tech.mit.edu/V105/N16/weisen.16n.html
What's one example?
A bullshit generator is only valuable to people who want to scale bullshit. Maybe it could replace TV writers one day, but why would I want them? I don't want a bunch of creative people to be unemployed so that the owners of ChatGPT can make a profit.
For non-users of the tool, there is no conceivable upside to any of this. All we get is:
- less believable digital/social media
- far, far more SEO spam
- more companies trying to push their customer service to bots instead of humans
We are witnessing the incipient stages of civilization collapse.