TechScape: Meet ChatGPT, the viral AI tool that may be a vision of our weird tech future
In this week's newsletter: OpenAI's new chatbot isn't a novelty. It's already powerful and useful - and could radically change the way we write online
AI tech, for so long a promising vision of the future but an underwhelming experience in the present, is starting to work. And the world is going to get weird as a result.
ChatGPT is the latest AI tool to go viral, sparking worry and wonder in equal measure. From our story:
The system ... is the latest evolution of the GPT family of text-generating AIs. Two years ago, the team's previous AI, GPT-3, was able to generate an opinion piece for the Guardian, and ChatGPT has significant further capabilities.
In the days since it was released, academics have generated responses to exam queries that they say would result in full marks if submitted by an undergraduate, and programmers have used the tool to solve coding challenges in obscure programming languages in a matter of seconds - before writing limericks explaining the functionality.
The weight of an object is determined by its mass, and the mass of a substance is a measure of the amount of matter it contains. Beef contains more matter than compressed air, so it has a higher mass and therefore weighs more.
The primary problem is that while the answers which ChatGPT produces have a high rate of being incorrect, they typically look like they might be good and the answers are very easy to produce. There are also many people trying out ChatGPT to create answers, without the expertise or willingness to verify that the answer is correct prior to posting. Because such answers are so easy to produce, a large number of people are posting a lot of answers.
As a large language model trained by OpenAI, I am not capable of sentience or consciousness. I am a machine learning model that has been trained to generate text based on the input I receive. I do not have the ability to think or feel in the same way that humans do. I exist solely to assist with generating text based on the input I receive.
The level of censorship pressure that's coming for AI and the resulting backlash will define the next century of civilization. Search and social media were the opening skirmishes. This is the big one. World War Orwell.
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