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.
It’s precisely ChatGPT’s inability to link the sources that is the concern.
At the heart of the issue I think is the fact that GPT can trick enough people into believing that there’s organized thought behind what it says. So people have started trusting and using AI in spaces that it doesn’t belong. Some fields have been resistant, but when there are places that operate under the incentive of cheapest labor wins (lowest bid contracts, for example), AI as a whole has been infiltrating under the guise of capitalism in places it shouldn’t currently (or perhaps ever) exist.
When you tell people not to trust google results or an article posted on facebook, there’s a surface level of understanding from most people that yea - you can go on the internet and spout nonsense and you shouldn’t trust these as sources. People might be a bit more willing to trust wikipedia nowadays, despite all their librarian friends and teachers telling them not to (and for hard research, this is still quite true). But despite the fact that AI is literally trained on data from the internet, people for some reason don’t view it the same way as the data it’s trained on. It’s ingested from people talking about and posting links to nonsense on facebook - it reflects this very data, yet many people treat it like it’s a thesaurus, or a dictionary, or better than google results. It’s not and we need to teach people that it isn’t.
The fact that there are lawyers already facing repercussions of using chatgpt in their cases citing things that don’t exist proves it
I dunno.
Every history book I’ve ever read seems to indicate that our species tends toward using new technology for the worst purposes.
Previously making misinformation, propaganda, spam etc even if using Google was still a manual activity bound by human limitations, now you can have a fully autonomous scam bot that will relatively cheaply scale to infinity
Scam call centers right now are hugely successful unfortunately, and they’re limited by human beings manning the phones, imagine a fleet of gpt agents scamming old ladies out of their life savings at record efficiency
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.
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.
Often time scammers put a few typos and whatnot into initial contact to weed out smarter people. Mainly if the scam is going to involve phone calls or something. Scams just trying to get passwords or infect your computer might try harder to look legit.
Only because interacting with people smart enough to recognize their spelling/grammar as fucked is a waste of their time. If it’s borderline free because an AI does the work, there’s way less need to do that.
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.
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 bet high false positive rate, and there are also AI tools that rewrite text to avoid detection by the existing detection tools.
I get chatgpt prompts in every search on bing and specifically for a troubleshoot in Linux. It is garbage, and I skip it completely.
It’s only good for stringing together nonsense, say for meeting minutes to pretend the meeting actually did something useful.
brave’s summarizer AI is pretty good.
but then you have to use Brave.
Woah that’s so scary
no, just pretty yucky, given how their CEO is a homophobe and how they’re trying to push crypto and everything.
I don’t enjoy the fact that they tie in crypto. I just want a browser.
The hype cycle around AI right now is misleading. It isn’t revolutionary because of these niche one-off use-cases, it’s revolutionary because it’s one AI that can do anything. Problem with that is what it’s most useful for is boring for non-technical people.
Take the library I wrote to create “semantic functions” from natural language tasks - one of the examples I keep going to in order to demonstrate the usefulness is
@semantic def list_people(text) -> list[str]: '''List the people mentioned in the given text.'''8 months ago, this would’ve been literally impossible. I could approximate it with thousands of lines of code using SpaCy and other NLP libraries to do NER, maybe a dictionary of known names with fuzzy matching, some heuristics to rule out city names or more advanced sentence structure parsing for false positives, but the result would be guaranteed to be worse for significantly more effort. Here, I just tell the AI to do it and it… does. Just like that. But you can’t hype up an algorithm that does boring stuff like NLP, so people focus on the danger of AI (which is real, but laymen and news focus on the wrong things), how it’s going to take everyone’s jobs (it will, but that’s a problem with our system which equates having a job to being allowed to live), how it’s super-intelligent, etc. It’s all the business logic and doing things that are hard to program but easy to describe that will really show off its power.
I’m both really excited and worried about the part where AI takes over so many jobs that enough people will be without work. I wonder how society will deal with that, will everyone get a proper base “salary” for existing or will there be huge refuge-like camps for the poor jobless people?
Under capitalism, i fear automationing will mean people losing their jobs only have worse, often dangerous opinions, that machines could do, meanwhile entertainment and the like will be flooded by even shittier quality AI made crap. I can only pray it will mean everyone’s basic needs being covered, but that requires a huge shift
Yeah, I just don’t see that happening. The whole “western” world is taking hard turn to the right, and that’s not going to get better any time soon.
I think it’s a combination of inability to link to sources (as you have stated) as well as the confidence in which it may provide incorrect information, and a lack of proper understanding from many people as to how LLMs work and exactly how incorrect they can be at times.
Sure, people can lie on the internet, but a chat bot talking to me and lying? Shouldn’t computers not be able to do that? (/s of course)
It’s not the inability to link sources, it’s the wholesale manufacture of them. It’s a language model, not a search engine. It doesn’t get its information from somewhere. It generates it probibalistically based on the structure of the sentence its forming.
It’ll include sources if the sentence structure suggests they should be there, but they’ll also just be built by probabilistic insertion of words.
It’ll include sources if the sentence structure suggests they should be there, but they’ll also just be built by probabilistic insertion of words.
I’ve seen attempts of people trying to train a LLM on information with sources. The end result was a model that would still hallucinate false information, and follow it up with a convincing looking source that doesn’t actually exist or a link that just leads to a 404 page. The way current LLMs work makes it impossible for them to mention accurate sources by default as they don’t remember full sentences or even any actual information, but just pick up some underlying patterns.
Currently the best you can do is letting a LLM come up with search engine queries to find relevant and up to date information for a certain question, and then making it formulate an answer based on what it found and including links to the page(s) it used. The main problem here is that LLMs are not great yet at verifying if a source is accurate, and most people will just take anything that mentions a source as a hard fact without even looking at what the source is.
It’s like a fancy interface for Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” button.
