CHATGPT: AN ORWELLIAN NIGHTMARE?
“A lie told often enough becomes the truth. “-Vladimir Lenin
If you do not know what ChatGPT is, you are not alone. Most people over 40 haven’t heard of it, or if they have it’s from the kiddos that are home from holiday break.
According to ZDNET, “ChatGPT is a natural language processing tool driven by AI technology that allows you to have human-like conversations and much more with a chatbot. The language model can answer questions, assist you with tasks such as composing emails, essays and code. Usage is currently open to the public free of charge because ChatGPT is in its research and feedback-collection phase. “
Currently, ChatGPT has a million users and growing. Remember, a user can be a person, corporation, or government! That’s over a million persons being potentially misled into a false sense of trust.
Let me give you the layman’s metaphor for this. It’s a shady-used car dealer on steroids. It makes up bs from the unlimited resource called the Internet to give you an answer that is not fact-checked, completely unverified to sell you on a point: everything it tells you is the truth, you can trust it.
The used car salesman says, “That car over there, heck, a little old lady has been driving it for the past 20 years. And there are only 10K miles on it. I swear.” When fact-checked and in truth, it was bought from a car lease company, it has had over 500 drivers, there are over 200k miles on it (but the odometer was rolled back), and it won’t last 2 miles out of the lot. Starting to get the picture?
The tech vernacular for this bs is sometimes called “hallucination” or “stochastic parroting.” Again, knowing these facts are crucial to understand if you are going to use ChatGPT or versions like it. Remember, this AI is NOT trained to fact-check, rather it is to predict the next word for a given input.
Here is a real-world example of its flaw. Technology analyst Benedict Evans asked ChatGPT to “write a bio for Benedict Evans” The result, he tweeted, was plausible, (but) almost entirely untrue.”
Despite this flaw, let us see what some of the top titans of the tech industry are saying about this AI messiah:
Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, tweeted that “ChatGPT is one of those rare moments in technology where you see a glimmer of how everything is going to be different going forward.”
Elon Musk tweeted that ChatGPT is “scary good. We are not far from dangerously strong AI.”
Here is the problem with all the accolades. This raises its stock. It creates a false belief in a product that is not exactly what it claims to be or what people believe it to be. This misleads the public and gives them a false sense of security that this AI can be trusted to give them reliable information.
This is troublesome for many reasons, but one in particular should garner the world’s attention. It is available to anyone free of charge, including totalitarian regimes.
Let’s look at the potential abuse of this tool by a totalitarian regime such as China. How would it go about weaponizing this type of AI? If the citizens of said country are only permitted to use a state-approved chat app/search engine, how could they evaluate the veracity of the information they are being given? They cannot fact-check the results of their query if it is a crime to try and do so. Even if they were permitted to fact-check the data provided to them, what kind of results do you think the state-sponsored search engine is going to give them?
Now, let us take it a step further, say this government tells the people the law states that they must make daily queries through the ChatGPT. Why would China make this request? Data. Citizen data. And all that data would be shared with…Open AI.
And in exchange for ChatGPT to have access to this data, ChatGPT must alter the ChatGPT AI algorithm according to China’s specifications. Refuse, and Open AI will be denied access to the data and China’s billion dollar market. Do you think that Open AI will turn down this horrific request for the greater freedom of the Chinese people? I can tell you that the track record of the past, specifically, Elon Musk, Tesla, Google, Nike, Airbnb, all have sacrificed the freedoms of the Chinese people for the bottom line: profit.
Do you think the Chinese people will refuse to use ChatGPT if the Chinese government tells them to do so under threat of being publically humiliated, fined and imprisoned through the social credit score system? No.
Moreover, say said government sees an uprising and protests from its people. It can simply ask the ChatGPT to write a persuasive public statement, regardless of the veracity of it, to appease the people and stop them from questioning the government’s actions. The ChatGPT artificial intelligence will do it, regardless of how big the lie is, or how it will affect the freedom of the people, and it will do it almost flawlessly. There is a term for this. It is called propaganda. It is mind control. The citizens in this digital dystopia will not only forget the truth, eventually they won’t even know what it is.
Don’t take my word for it. Look at what some of the experts are doing and saying about this type of AI:
Stack Overflow, the Q&A site for coders and programmers, has temporarily banned users from sharing ChatGPT responses.
Emily Bender, professor of linguistics at the University of Washington, has long pushed back on this notion.
Arvind Narayanan, a computer science professor at Princeton, pointed out in a tweet: “People are excited about using ChatGPT for learning. It’s often very good. But the danger is that you can’t tell when it’s wrong unless you already know the answer. I tried some basic information security questions. In most cases, the answers sounded plausible but were in fact BS.”
And What does OPEN AI – the company that created ChatGPT, have to say about correcting its weapon of digital destruction?
I can attempt to interpret this for you. They are not going to fix it. They are not going to fact-check anything it writes. Why? Because it is not cost-effective for this ‘for profit’ corporation.
And on a side note, when you use this product, you are freely giving Its creation company, Open AI, all your data. So free is not free. It is an exchange. You give them all your data for free, and they let you improve their for-profit IP. Then, probably at some point, this company will package your data and sell it to the highest corporate/government bidder through data brokers.
This all should terrify you. Tell everyone you know. Ask your tech friends if this article has merit. You will not like the answer. I am scared for humanity as private ‘for profit’ corporations accelerate their surveillance capitalism, digital, social credit score, geofencing, and 15-minute smart cities catapulting humanity to an unknown, enslaved end.
Oh, if you wanted to know who founded this AI Frankenstein: OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Twitter owner Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, and Sam Altman.
Until these companies stop having big corporate meetings with small ideas with an emphasis on looking right rather than doing what is right for humanity, we have no free future.
Oh, another apocalyptic side note; it is going to take all our jobs, “Some estimates even claim that a staggering 80 per cent of jobs run the risk of being automated [artificial intelligence] in the coming decades.”-United Nations
…If Skynet doesn’t take me by my next blog, see you then. RRK
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a [digital] boot stomping on a human face forever.”-George Orwell