Can ChatGPT be a 'virus that has been released'?

At that time, Altman described the potential of OpenAI in language that sounded strange to some. Altman said, for example, that the opportunity with artificial general intelligence—machine intelligence that can solve problems as well as a human—is so incomprehensibly enormous that if OpenAI If he managed to crack it, the team could "perhaps capture all the future values ​​in the universe." He said the company "is going to have to not publish research" because it's so powerful. When asked if OpenAI guilty of instilling fear, Elon Musk, the team's co-founder, has repeatedly called on all organizations developing AI to regulate — Altman spoke about the dangers of No. thinking about the "social consequences" when "you're building something with an exponential curve."

The audience laughed at various points in the conversation, unsure how seriously to take Altman. However, now no one laughs anymore. Although machines are not yet as intelligent as people, the technology which OpenAI has released to the world ever since is close enough for some critics to fear it could be our downfall (and even more sophisticated technology is reportedly on the way).

In fact, although heavy users say that not so smart el Chat GPT, model that OpenAI made available to the general public last week, is so capable of answering pYou ask as a person, that professionals in a variety of industries are struggling to process the implications. Educators, for example, wonder how they will be able to distinguish original writing from the algorithmically generated essays they are required to receive, and that can avoid the anti-plagiarism software.

Paul Kedrosky is not an educator per se, he is an economist, venture capitalist, and fellow at MIT who calls himself a "frustrated normal with a penchant for thinking about risks and unintended consequences in complex systems." But he is among those who are suddenly worried about our collective future, s Twitter He commented: "Too bad OpenAI dropped this unrestrained pocket nuclear bomb on a society that was not ready.” Kedrosky wrote: “Obviously I feel that ChatGPT (and its ilk) should be retired immediately. And, if it is ever reintroduced, only with strict restrictions."

On some of Kedrosky's concerns and why he thinks OpenAI it's driving what it believes is the "most disruptive change the US economy has seen in 100 years," and not in a good way.

Question: ChatGPT to the market. What sparked your reaction on Twitter?

PK: I've played with these conversational user interfaces and AI services in the past and this is obviously a big leap further. And what concerned me here in particular is the casual brutality of it, with massive consequences for a number of different activities. They're not just the obvious ones, like high school essay writing, but in almost any domain where there's a grammar, that is, an organized way of expressing yourself. That could be software engineering, high school essays, legal documents. All of them are easily eaten by this ravenous beast and spat out again with no compensation to whatever was used to train it.

I heard from a colleague at UCLA who told me that they have no idea what to do with the essays at the end of the current term, where they get hundreds per course and thousands per department, because they no longer have a clue what is fake and what is not. So doing this so casually, as someone told me today, is reminiscent of a so-called white hat hacker who finds a bug in a widely used product, then reports it to the developer before the general public knows so the developer can patch your product and we don't have mass devastation and power grids go down. This is the opposite, where a virus has been released into the wild without concern for the consequences.

Question: You feel as if you could eat the world.

Some might say, 'Well, was it the same way when automation came to auto plants and auto workers were put out of work? But this is very different. These specific learning technologies are self-catalyzing; they are learning from requests. So the robots in a manufacturing plant, while disruptive and created incredible economic consequences for the people who work there, didn't just turn around and start absorbing everything that was going on inside the factory, moving sector by sector, while that It's not exactly what we can expect, it can happen.

Question: Musk left OpenAI partially by Disagreements about the company's development, he said in 2019, and has long talked about AI as an existential threat. But people complained that he didn't know what he was talking about. We are now faced with this powerful technology, and it is unclear who is stepping in to address it.

I think it's going to start in a lot of locations at once, most of which will be very clunky, and people will make fun of them. But sadly, we've gotten ourselves into something with far-reaching consequences. So, in the same way that the FTC required people who blogged years ago to have affiliate links and make money from them, I think that on a trivial level, people will be forced to disclose that we didn't write any of this stuff. This is all generated by a machine'.

I also believe that we are going to see new arguments for the ongoing lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI for copyright infringement in the context of our training machine learning algorithms. I think there is going to be a bigger problem than the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 1998) regarding this service.

And I think there is the potential for lawsuits and partial settlements regarding the consequences of the services, which, as you know, will probably take too long and not help enough people, but I don't see how we won't be done with these technologies.

Question: What is the thinking at MIT?

Andy McAfee and his group there are more optimistic and have a more orthodox view that every time we see disruption, other opportunities are created, people are mobile, moving from place to place and occupation to occupation, and we shouldn't be so stubborn that we believe that this particular evolution of technology is the one around which we cannot mutate and migrate. And I think that's generally true.

But the lesson of the last five years in particular has been that these changes can take a long time. Free trade, for example, is one of those incredibly disruptive experiences for the whole economy, and we all told ourselves as economists watching this that the economy will adapt and people in general will benefit from lower prices. What no one anticipated was that someone would organize all the angry people and elect Donald Trump. So there's this idea that we can anticipate and predict what the consequences will be, but we can't.

Question: You commented on writing essays for high school and college. Theorists have already been asked whether it would be plagiarism to use ChatGPT to write an article.

The purpose of writing an essay is to show that you can think, so this short-circuits the process and defeats the purpose. Again, in terms of consequences and externalities, if we can't let people have homework because we no longer know if they are cheating or not, that means everything has to happen in the classroom and has to be supervised. There can be nothing for us to take home. More things need to be done orally, and what does that mean? It means that the school is much more expensive, much more crafted, much smaller, and at the exact moment we are trying to do the opposite. The consequences for higher education are devastating in terms of the actual provision of a service.

What do you think of the idea of ​​universal basic income, or allowing everyone to participate in the earnings of the AI?

I am a much less strong advocate than I was before COVID. The reason is that COVID, in a sense, was an experiment with a universal basic income. We paid people to stay home and they came up with QAnon. So I'm very nervous about what happens when people don't have to get in a car, drive somewhere, do a job they hate, and come home again, because the devil finds work for idle hands, and there will be plenty of it. of idle hands and much mischief.