There are lots of articles about bad use cases of ChatGPT that Google already provided for decades.
Want to get bad medical advice for the weird pain in your belly? Google can tell you it’s cancer, no problem.
Do you want to know how to make drugs without a lab? Google even gives you links to stores where you can buy the materials for it.
Want some racism/misogyny/other evil content? Google is your ever helpful friend and garbage dump.
What’s the difference apart from ChatGPT’s inability to link to existing sources?
Edit: Just to clear things up. This post is specifically not about the new use cases that come from AI. Sure, Google cannot make semi-non-functional mini programs automatically, and Google will not write a fake paper in whole for me. I am specifically talking about the “This will change the world” articles, that mirror stuff that Google can do exactly like ChatGPT can.
One enables the other, or rather the snake is constantly eating itself. SEO content and clickbait were already plagiarizing and consuming human communication, polluting the web by crowding out actual information – ChatGPT and LLMs calcify and turbo-charge this. Tech companies are reacting by piling their own LLMs on top – ingesting garbage and generating yet more garbage. Soon enough, appending " reddit" to our search terms will not be enough to quickly and freely get human information from the web.
Meanwhile – laymen are being told that ChatGPT is an oracle, an intelligence, by companies and enthusiasts trying to build a crypto-style hype train. And the laymen are reacting accordingly. They are being told that ChatGPT knows everything. It doesn’t even know what a pineapple is.
Yeah, the direction commercial AI took is truely disheartening… Like, AI is a useful tool, but it’s been buisnesized where everyone puts AI is places where it shouldn’t be. Mostly because people don’t understand what they are doing so surely an AI model will…
The other day a dude wanted to dev an app with me about some random shit with an AI, except it could all be done with standard algorithms, and would probably perform much better too.
I looked at him and almost facepalmed on the spot…
Yeah, like that one in this thread who uses an LLM in Python to perform trivial tasks. They write a function with an LLM prompt as the body and then it gets executed by the LLM at runtime. Python was apparently not inefficient enough.
I don’t know, if I need a trivial function I just code it. Then I know it works and performs in a decent time.
I mean, that use case is definitely cool, but there is no way this should ever be used in production code.
It’s kinda like using dynamite as a novel heating system.
I feel like it’s the occasional unpredictability that people are scared of. Whether it’s people being unable to tell if something was created by ChatGPT, if it’s pulling false sources, or people finding ways around set limitations and filters.
There’s something that worries me about GPT-like technologies, and I see very few people talking about it: GPT-based social media bots.
It can give people and groups to create much advanced mass manipulation strategies. Imagine a lot of gpt accounts on all sites creating comments advocating pro or against something, every time it’s mentioned, in a very natural language, that can fool most people.
It worries me a lot, and I’m sure it will be done at some point. If recent elections around the world were a mess due to a lot of social media manipulation and fake news campaigns, now imagine that powered by gpt.
I was gonna reply to this in the style of ChatGPT, but I somehow feel like that’d be the same as joking about having a bomb at airport security. But yeah, this is my main concern as well. Not only social media, but even blogs and reputable-looking websites which can act as “sources”. And what about Wikipedia bots?
I’m not worried about the loss of jobs or the sentience of computers, but rather the incapability to discern what’s real and what’s not. Could online human certificates be a thing? Multi-factor authentication (that is somehow still anonymous)?
I have a hard time imagining a system that can simultaneously identify someone as uniquely human while still maintaining anonymity. Any given website or person online might not know your name, but you would have to have some sort of public key that would identify you. That key would be a fingerprint that could tie all your online activity together for anyone interested.
What if the key is stored locally, and only the “I am a human” certificate was shared with the website? Kind of like Face ID and touch fingerprints.
I don’t know. Social media bots have been doing exactly that quite well for a long time. Turns out, you don’t actually have to write a comment, you just need to find another one that talks about the same key words and copy it in.
You still get great natural language (since it is natural language) and it fools most people as well.
Political talking points aren’t that varied. There are a handful of different takes on each topic and people repeat them already, so just copying them doesn’t make much of a difference.
It’s not the same. GPT-based bots add much more to the situation.
Current bots are easily identifiable, and can be just banned when spotted, but gpt bots can interact in a way that makes is more difficult to spot. They can be programmed to present different personalities and tastes, commenting on several places, and even chit-chatting here and there. Then, they will do their propaganda, considering the contexts, arguing and replying to counterarguments.
It’s a much more complex structure, and much harder to identify. Today, gpt produces text following some patterns, but that’s something that can be improved.
All we can really hope for is effective AI-driven detection methods for AI generated content. Here’s hoping that AIs are good at spotting one another.
That’s not a workable solution. Since Meta’s algorithm was leaked, there has been such rapid advancement on the open-source side of LLMs that the tech has diverged too far to ever be detectable.
You can now spin up a custom, targeted LLM in a few hours on low-power consumer hardware. And it beats the massive incumbents within the narrower scope of the training.
Think, a Facebook comment bot, targeted specifically to sound like pro-[VIEW] comments, complete with typos and Internet slang. Or a high school essay bot, trained exclusivity on 5-paragraph essays.
The tech right now gives a very high false positive rate, and there are also AI tools that rewrite text to avoid detection by the existing tools.
It’s not so much the inability to link sources but the active laundering of those sources that bugs me. We’ve been lucky that shady information has largely had a vibe that’s pretty easy to spot. ChatGPT presents everything with the same level of professionalism.
Worse, while we might collectively start discounting direct chatbot output because LLMs are dirty liars, scammers can now cheaply rewrite their typo-ridden weird ass screeds into something resembling professionally produced copy.
I like to think of it from a different standpoint. Propaganda and fake news has existed for hundreds of years, if not millennia. It’s just that in the past it was mostly created by wealthy folks, and now anyone can create their own.
You could even say, propaganda and fake news were the original form.
