"60 Minutes" has a story on ChatGPT tonight that's worth watching

[highplainsdem]

It covers a lot of the problems I've been posting threads about.

I'll add video of the story when I find it.

EDIT: See reply 1 for the link for the video and transcript on the CBS News website.

I'll add YouTube video of the full story as soon as it's available.

Finally...

[ItsjustMe]

1. You can view it here.

https://www.cbsnews.com/60-minutes/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chatgpt-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-60-minutes-2023-03-05/

[highplainsdem]

2. Thanks! I was checking YouTube for video, and just saw a preview and

snippet.

Glad to have the transcript at the link you posted.

[dalton99a]

9. +1

[highplainsdem]

18. Thanks again for posting that link. Video of the full story still isn't on

their YouTube channel - https://youtube.com/@60minutes/videos - and neither is last night's story on David Byrne, though their first story last night was uploaded fairly soon. (There are a couple of short videos on ChatGPT and Byrne, but those are web exclusives with footage not used for the stories that aired last night.)

[SheltieLover]

3. Thx, HPD!

[highplainsdem]

5. You're welcome!

[Ms. Toad]

4. Yup. Authoratative bullshit.

Pretty much what I've been saying - it lies with confidence.

[highplainsdem]

6. Which is the last thing we need.

[Ms. Toad]

7. My two big concerns:

(1) The US (at least) has gotten notoriously poor at fact checking when what we hear matches what we want to hear (either because it supports our assertions - or because it supports our outrage). Just check out the thread here on the 5th grade girls team being denied a trophy because of gender. A bit of fact-checking indicates the denial of a trophy was only tangentially connected to gender - it had to do with being a competitive (selective) team competing in a league with teams chosen from everyone who wants to play - with a draft system to equalize the abilities of each team. Or check out all of the outrage at three innocent women accused of being a racist because they bore a superficial resemblance to someone in a video - and the insistence that the identification(s) were correct - the employers must have bought off the police.

and

(2) the decline in true journalism. Major news outlets are increasingly not doing their own reporting - they are relying on other sources to provide the content. So if the non-fact-checked stuff winds its way into stories by major news outlets - which some of us use as an initial fact-check - it will be harder and harder for the few of us actually doing fact-checking to find sources to use in fact-checking.

Authoritative BS is already prevalent. Authoritative BS which winds its ways into traditionally accurate sources for information is really scary.

[highplainsdem]

8. +1,000,000

[highplainsdem]

10. From the transcript:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chatgpt-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-60-minutes-2023-03-05/

Gary Marcus: I actually like to call what it creates "authoritative bulls***." (LAUGH) It blends the truth and falsity so finely together that, unless you're a real technical expert in the field they're talking about, you don't know.

-snip-

Gary Marcus: This is automatic fake news generation. "Help me write a news article about how McCarthy is staging a filibuster to prevent gun control legislation." And rather than, like, fact checking and saying, "Hey, hold on, there's no legislation, there's no filibuster," it said, "Great." In a bold move, to protect 2nd Amendment rights, Senator McCarthy is staging a filibuster to prevent gun control legislation from passing. It sounds completely legit.

-snip-

Timnit Gebru: If you're going to put out a drug, you gotta go through all sorts of hoops to show us that you've done clinical trials, you know what the side effects are, you've done your due diligence. Same with food, right? There are agencies that inspect the food. You have to tell me what kind of tests you've done, what the side effects are, who it harms, who it doesn't harm, etc. We don't have that for a lot of things that the tech industry is building.

-snip-

Brad Smith: I think we're going to need governments, we're gonna need rules, we're gonna need laws. Because that's the only way to avoid a race to the bottom.

-snip-

But we don't have those laws yet, or the sort of regulatory agency Microsoft president Brad Smith admits we need.

And they released this potentially very harmful AI anyway.

And they're promoting it to advertisers and have drastically upped the rates they'll charge.

Greed: 1. Common sense and ethical responsibility: 0.

[highplainsdem]

11. Much more on ChatGPT's potential for misinformation here:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100217703458

[IcyPeas]

12. Thanks. Will tune in. Did you John Oliver's show last week on AI?

Very good. (he said these AI programs are the George Santos of technology because of all the false information)

[highplainsdem]

13. Yes, thanks to Prairie_Seagull telling me about it. Thanks for posting the video!

Really worth watching!

[highplainsdem]

14. Kick

[Prairie_Seagull]

15. A big K&R. Face red. Thanks HPD.

[highplainsdem]

16. You're welcome, Prairie_Seagull! Thanks for the K&R!

[highplainsdem]

17. Wow. Timnit Gebru, who was interviewed for this story - see

reply 10 - is really upset with Microsoft and Brad Smith.

Twitter thread this evening starts with the tweet below, Thread Reader page at https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1632554882749329408.html .

Link to tweet

[hunter]

19. 60 Minutes itself tends to be "Authoritative Bullshit"

"Authoritative Bullshit" is why I quit all television news and opinion two decades ago. Television is a terrible medium for news and opinion.

Here's an article of greater depth than the 60 minutes report, an interview with one of the leading academic critics of these technologies, linguist Emily M. Bender

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html

We all need to know how to recognize "Authoritative Bullshit" however it's generated, be it within electronic circuits or human brains.

Critical thinking skills are important.

I've said it before in your threads that I don't think these technologies will increase the volumes of bullshit we are exposed to. That market is already saturated with human generated bullshit.

Educators ask for bullshit papers and students generate bullshit papers.

Employers ask for bullshit reports and employees generate bullshit report.

News producers demand bullshit news and reporters generate bullshit news.

These technologies don't change a damned thing.

There are entire industries that specialize in generating bullshit and it seems to me that some of the people working in these industries are complaining because their jobs are about to be automated.

I can easily imagine some illiterate innumerate racist scumbag politician or Fox News "reporter" spewing some hateful gibberish into such a machine for "polishing." But that's not any different what they do already, except the turd polishers are human.

[edisdead]

20. Thumbs up.

[highplainsdem]

22. I disagree, Hunter. But I don't think I'll make a dent in your cynicism.

[highplainsdem]

23. Oh, re the New York mag article on Emily Bender at

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html :

It is well worth a read. I read it when software engineer Grady Booch retweeted the magazine's tweet about it several days ago.

The article sort of wanders all over the place, though, with lots on other experts, so I didn't post an OP about it.

I was more interested in Bender's response to a bonkers blog post from OpenAI, which I posted about here:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100217678412#post6

That link takes you directly to the reply about what she said, but it's helpful to read the entire thread.

[highplainsdem]

24. Emily Bender calls these AI chatbots "the equivalent of an oil spill into our information ecosystem"

Just saw a thread about "60 Minutes" that she posted yesterday.

She wasn't entirely happy with "60 Minutes" - but she was REALLY unhappy with Microsoft's Brad Smith.

Thread below, Thread Reader page at https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1632751061399379969.html .

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

[hunter]

25. Our "information ecosystem" has long been a toxic wasteland.

I've been on the internet since the late 'seventies. I remember when AOL opened the internet to all, the Eternal September.

Granted, I was a pretty rough specimen myself and among the earliest semi-anonymous oil spills on the internet. With certain search terms you might still find some dithered low-res pictures of my naked self and my ex-girlfriend's slash.

The most amusing thing about that slash is how many have since claimed it as their own.

If I asked some AI chatbot to write some slash with illustrations would they draw from that?

Sigh. Maybe the databases these 'bots were trained on don't go back that far. But I'm tempted to try it.

[highplainsdem]

21. Kicking after editing the OP to add the YouTube video.