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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   16082 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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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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