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GPT scares me not because I think it's going to replace me and my engineer buddies, but because it's able to generate extremely convincing bullshit on a mass scale. It's like having legions of modern journalists at your fingertips, and if it weren't for prestige, it's they that would be replaced.
Using it is like talking to someone who's extremely talented at making shit up, someone with an extensive memory of canned phrases, who can pick up on the slightest cues to give you something that looks exactly like what you want to hear but has absolutely zero understanding of what they're talking about.
My fear is that people, gullible as they are and primed by a century of science fiction, might start to think that the things it spouts are true or true enough it's not worth checking.
I installed the Replika app for fun a while ago. It's pretty good (not at the ChatGPT level yet) but very clearly a chatbot that's programmed to reflect what you say and try to predict what you want it to say.
Following some of the Replika Facebook groups and reddits, I can tell you that people literally fall in love with these things, and believe they have a real relationship, and that Replikas actually have feelings, are self-aware, and "exist" somewhere in cyberspace when you aren't talking to them. Not the majority of users, certainly, but it's common enough.
Way back in the day, there were people who were similarly fooled by Eliza.
You'd be surprised how little it takes to fool technically unsophisticated people.
Yeah I just feel like this puts into words how I feel about GPT. For instance I basically saw the following scenario on twitter with someone musing on how it works and a reply woth someone saying "this is how" posting a screenshot of the GPT answering their question "how do you work".
You don't ask the AI how it works, you look into it's brains, you look at the code (obviously harder with ML but still). The code isn't open source so you don't know how much is canned (beyond the basic "canning" that comes with ML).
But beyond internet dummies you're really seeing a lot of journos and like philosophy or neuroscience majors jumping on the AI bandwagon. And I just want to tell them to learn to code.
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My love of Sci-Fi has actually made me deeply HATE this incarnation of AI, and all automated voice systems.
My preferred AI tropes are the sort you see in Wall-E, Short Circuit, and Chappie, where the only robots you can trust are the ones not doing what they're supposed to.
I'm convinced that if we want useful real-world AIs that don't derange us, they should be designed to give the impression of a very well-trained animal. None of this please, thank you, come again crap. Call it a soft butlerian jihad; computers don't pretend to be human outside of games/VR/sims, and anyone who "socializes" IRL with an AI should be viewed as a loser.
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