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.

  • ZickZack
    13•1 year ago

    While the inability to source is a huge problem, but you also have to keep in mind that complaining about AI has other objective beyond the obvious “AI bad”.

    • it’s marketing: “Our thing is so powerful it could irreparably change someone’s life” is still advertising even if that irreparable change is bad. Saying “AI so powerful it’s dangerous” just sounds less advertis-y than “AI so powerful you cannot not invest in it” despite both leading to similar conclusions (you can look back at the “fearvertising” done during the original AI boom: same paint, different color)
    • it’s begging for regulatory zeals to be put into place: Everyone with a couple of millions can build an LLM from scratch. That might sound like a lot, but it’s only getting cheaper and it doesn’t need highly intricate systems to replicate. Specifically the ability to finetune a large model with few datapoints allows even open-source non-profits like OpenAssistant to compete against the likes of google and openai: Google has made that very explicit in their leaked We have no moat memo. This is why you see people like Sam Altman talking to congress about the dangers of AI: He has no serious competetive advantage and hopes that with sufficient fear-mongering he can get the government to give him one.

    Complaining about AI is as much about the AI as it is about the economical incentives behind AI.