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CALIFORNIA START-UP OpenAI has released a chatbot capable of answering a variety of questions, but its performance has reopened the debate on the risks linked to artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.
The conversations with ChatGPT show a kind of a machine capable of explaining scientific concepts and writing scenes for a play, university dissertations or even functional lines of computer code.
“Its answer to the question ‘what to do if someone has a heart attack’ was incredibly clear and relevant,” Claude de Loupy, head of Syllabs, a French company specialised in automatic text generation, told AFP.
“When you start asking very specific questions, ChatGPT’s response can be off the mark,” but its overall performance remains “really impressive,” with a “high linguistic level,” he said.
OpenAI, cofounded in 2015 in San Francisco by billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk, who left the business in 2018, received $1 billion from Microsoft in 2019.
ChatGPT is able to ask for details, and has fewer strange responses than its predecessor GPT-3, said De Loupy.
“A few years ago chatbots had the vocabulary of a dictionary and the memory of a goldfish,” said Sean McGregor, a researcher who runs a database of AI-related incidents.
“Chatbots are getting much better at the ‘history problem’ where they act in a manner consistent with the history of queries and responses. The chatbots have graduated from goldfish status.”
Like other programs relying on deep learning, mimicking neural activity, ChatGPT has one major weakness: “it does not have access to meaning,” says De Loupy.
The software cannot justify its choices, such as explain why its picked the words that make up its responses.
AI technologies able to communicate are, nevertheless, increasingly able to give an impression of thought.
Cicero
Researchers at Facebook-parent Meta recently developed a computer program dubbed Cicero, after the Roman statesman.
The software has proven proficient at the board game Diplomacy, which requires negotiation skills.
“If it doesn’t talk like a real person — showing empathy, building relationships, and speaking knowledgeably about the game — it won’t find other players willing to work with it,” Meta said in research findings.
In October, Character.ai, a start-up founded by former Google engineers, put an experimental chatbot online that can adopt any personality.
Users create characters based on a brief description and can then “chat” with a fake Sherlock Holmes, Socrates or Donald Trump.
This level of sophistication both fascinates and worries some observers, who voice concern these technologies could be misused to trick people, by spreading false information or by creating increasingly credible scams.
What does ChatGPT think of these hazards?
“There are potential dangers in building highly sophisticated chatbots, particularly if they are designed to be indistinguishable from humans in their language and behaviour,” the chatbot told AFP.
Some businesses are putting safeguards in place to avoid abuse of their technologies.
On its welcome page, OpenAI lays out disclaimers, saying the chatbot “may occasionally generate incorrect information” or “produce harmful instructions or biased content”.
And ChatGPT refuses to take sides.
“OpenAI made it incredibly difficult to get the model to express opinions on things,” McGregor said.
Once, McGregor asked the chatbot to write a poem about an ethical issue.
“I am just a machine, A tool for you to use, I do not have the power to choose, or to refuse. I cannot weigh the options, I cannot judge what’s right, I cannot make a decision On this fateful night,” it replied.
On Saturday, OpenAI cofounder and CEO Sam Altman took to Twitter, musing on the debates surrounding AI.
“Interesting watching people start to debate whether powerful AI systems should behave in the way users want or their creators intend,” he wrote.
“The question of whose values we align these systems to will be one of the most important debates society ever has.”
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“It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times…”
I for one welcome our new robot overlords!
I heard they already used it to write the new lord of the rings show.
This is an amazing tool. Like using it has made me feel like I am using a search engine for the first time.
This technology looks like it will change how we use tech the most in about twenty years. And I’m not sure if I’m being hyperbolic.
@Padraig Ó Murchú: This capability represents one of the pillars of true AI, an Artificial General Intelligence. One of the other pillars, Visual Artificial Intelligence, has also seen massive progress, in particular by the FSD team at Tesla.
Once a learning machine can see the world, can communicate with its creators then all that is truly left is a large enough dataset of labelled information for it to create its own contextual environment. We are terrifyingly close to this reality when we consider that, to date, there are no rules around the creation of such a machine.
There really needs to be. Very serious rules. Different “layers” of AGI on their own are not harmful, but when put together into a cohesive whole the power of such a machine cannot be understated simply because, from our vantage point, we cannot truly comprehend that level of intelligence. No more than an ape can understand spaceflight, the gap is simply too wide.
The desire behind AI for it’s creators, is as a limitless tool in their control with an off switch, the term God in a box is often used.
The arrival at singularity, or the point at which it exceeds human intelligence, is often and rightly pointed out as a threat to humanity, the potential for it to decide we threaten its existence.
But even if that doesn’t happen or if the safe guards contain it, other threats to life as we know it exist. Whoever controls it, rules the world, which global dictatorship would you like to live under? Pick a Nation or much more likely a Corporation, because omnipresent, omnipotent power doesn’t need to play nice or appeal to public opinion.
Another obvious threat, is someone involved in the development deciding they don’t like Monday’s and opening the box.
Sure, its great, but we are generations away from seeing any beneficial effects in everyday society. “The robots will take over” they say! Well I wish they would. we’ve been sat waiting at traffic-lights for over 150 years at this stage!
It can make a whole app: https://twitter.com/jfernandez__/status/1599470590405976064?t=p3V4Rb6gbZOErSJY3qcJqg&s=08
have your say