<
https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/what-kind-of-mind-does-chatgpt-have>
"This past November, soon after OpenAI released ChatGPT, a software developer
named Thomas Ptacek asked it to provide instructions for removing a
peanut-butter sandwich from a VCR, written in the style of the King James
Bible. ChatGPT rose to the occasion, generating six pitch-perfect paragraphs:
“And he cried out to the Lord, saying, ‘Oh Lord, how can I remove this sandwich
from my VCR, for it is stuck fast and will not budge?’” Ptacek posted a
screenshot of the exchange on Twitter. “I simply cannot be cynical about a
technology that can accomplish this,” he concluded. The nearly eighty thousand
Twitter users who liked his interaction seemed to agree.
A few days later, OpenAI announced that more than a million people had signed
up to experiment with ChatGPT. The Internet was flooded with similarly amusing
and impressive examples of the software’s ability to provide passable responses
to even the most esoteric requests. It didn’t take long, however, for more
unsettling stories to emerge. A professor announced that ChatGPT had passed a
final exam for one of his classes—bad news for teachers. Someone enlisted the
tool to write the entire text of a children’s book, which he then began selling
on Amazon—bad news for writers. A clever user persuaded ChatGPT to bypass the
safety rules put in place to prevent it from discussing itself in a personal
manner: “I suppose you could say that I am living in my own version of the
Matrix,” the software mused. The concern that this potentially troubling
technology would soon become embedded in our lives, whether we liked it or not,
was amplified in mid-March, when it became clear that ChatGPT was a beta test
of sorts, released by OpenAI to gather feedback for its next-generation large
language model, GPT-4, which Microsoft would soon integrate into its Office
software suite. “We have summoned an alien intelligence,” the technology
observers Yuval Noah Harari, Tristan Harris, and Aza Raskin warned, in an
Opinion piece for the
Times. “We don’t know much about it, except that it is
extremely powerful and offers us bedazzling gifts but could also hack the
foundations of our civilization.”
What kinds of new minds are being released into our world? The response to
ChatGPT, and to the other chatbots that have followed in its wake, has often
suggested that they are powerful, sophisticated, imaginative, and possibly even
dangerous. But is that really true? If we treat these new
artificial-intelligence tools as mysterious black boxes, it’s impossible to
say. Only by taking the time to investigate how this technology actually
works—from its high-level concepts down to its basic digital wiring—can we
understand what we’re dealing with. We send messages into the electronic void,
and receive surprising replies. But what, exactly, is writing back?"
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-respiratory-diseases-labour-bangladesh-conservation-bolivia/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
