AI experts on whether you should be “afraid” of ChatGPT

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence that writes for you, any writing you like: letters, song lyrics, research papers, recipes, therapy sessions, poems, essays, sketches, even software code. And despite its crude name (GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer), more than a million people were using it within five days of launch.

How easy is it to use?

Try typing “Write a limerick about the impact of AI on humanity.”

Or how “Tell the story of gold in the style of the King James Bible.”

Microsoft has announced that it will develop the program into Microsoft Word. The first books written by ChatGPT have already been published. (Well, himself-published by humans.)

“I think this is huge,” said Professor Erik Brynjolfsson, director of Stanford University’s Digital Economy Lab. “I wouldn’t be surprised 50 years from now, people look back and say, wow, that was a really important series of inventions that happened in the early 2020s.

“A big part of the US economy is knowledge and information work, and that’s who will be affected the most,” he said. “I would put people like lawyers right at the top of the list. Obviously, a lot of authors, screenwriters. But I like to use the word “influenced” rather than “replaced” because I think if done right, it won’t work. to be AI replacing lawyers, it will be lawyers who work with AI replacing lawyers who don’t work with AI.”

But not everyone is delighted.

Timnit Gebru, an AI researcher specializing in the ethics of artificial intelligence, “I think we should be really horrified by this whole thing.”

ChatGPT learned to write by studying millions of writings on the internet. Unfortunately, believe it or not, not everything on the internet is true. “It’s not taught to understand what’s fact, what’s fiction, or anything like that,” Gebru said. “It’s just going to bring back what was on the web.”

Of course, sometimes it writes sounds authoritative and self-confident, but completely false;

And then there’s the problem on purpose disinformation. Experts worry that people will use ChatGPT to flood social media with fake articles that sound professional, or flood Congress with “mainstream” letters that sound authentic.

Gebru said: “We need to understand the harms before we roll something out everywhere, and mitigate those risks before we put something like this in place.”

But no one can be more upset than teachers. And here is why.

Write an english class essay on race in the movie to kill a mockingbird.

Some students are already using ChatGPT to cheat. It’s no wonder ChatGPT has been called “The End of High School English,” “The End of the College Essay,” and “The Return of the Handwritten Essay in the Classroom.”

A ChatGPT user does not need to know structure or syntax, vocabulary, grammar or even spelling. But Jane Rosenzweig, director of the Harvard Literary Center, said: thinking. When we teach writing, we teach people to research an idea, understand what other people have said about that idea, and find out what they think about it. A machine can do the part where it puts ideas on paper, but it can’t do the part where it puts your ideas on paper.”

Seattle and New York school systems have banned ChatGPT. so some colleges. Rosenzweig said: “The idea that we’re going to ban it goes against something bigger than us that is about to happen. everywhere. It will be in word processing programs. It will be on every car.”

Some educators are trying to figure out how to work with ChatGPT to create a first draft. But Rosenzweig counters. “Our students will stop being writers and they will become editors.

“My initial reaction was, are we doing this because ChatGPT exists? Or are we doing it because it’s better than other things we’ve already done?” he said.

OpenAI, the company that launched the program, declined Sunday Morning’s request for an interview but offered a statement.

“We do not want ChatGPT to be used for misleading purposes, in schools or anywhere else. Our policy states that when sharing content, all users must clearly state that it is generated by artificial intelligence “in a way that no one could reasonably miss or misunderstand. and we are already developing a tool to help anyone identify text generated by ChatGPT.”

They talk about an algorithmic “watermark,” an invisible flag embedded in ChatGPT’s writing that can identify its source.

There are ChatGPT detectors, but they probably won’t stand a chance against the upcoming new version, ChatGPT 4, which has been trained on 500 times more typing. People who have seen it say it is a miracle.

Eric Brynjolfsson of Stanford said: “A very senior person in Open AI, he basically described it as a phase change. You know, it’s like going from water to steam. It’s just “another level of ability”.

Like it or not, AI writing is here for sure.

Brynjolfsson suggests accepting it. “I think we’re going to have the best decade of potential creative flourishing that we’ve ever had because a whole group of people, many more people than ever before, will be able to contribute to our collective art and science.”

But maybe we should let ChatGPT have the final say.

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Story produced by Sarah Kugel. Editor: Lauren Barnello.

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