ChatGPT: BS FTW?

Sunday, January 8, 2023

Speaking of ChatGPT, the recent “Ezra Klein Show” episode with A.I. expert Gary Marcus was insightful. This seems concerning:

Klein: And what unnerved me a bit about ChatGPT was the sense that we are going to drive the cost of bullshit to zero when we have not driven the cost of truthful or accurate or knowledge advancing information lower at all. And I’m curious how you see that concern.

Marcus: It’s exactly right. These systems have no conception of truth. Sometimes they land on it and sometimes they don’t, but they’re all fundamentally bullshitting in the sense that they’re just saying stuff that other people have said and trying to maximize the probability of that. It’s just auto complete, and auto complete just gives you bullshit.

And it is a very serious problem. I just wrote an essay called something like “The Jurassic Park Moment for A.I.” And that Jurassic Park moment is exactly that. It’s when the price of bullshit reaches zero and people who want to spread misinformation, either politically or maybe just to make a buck, start doing that so prolifically that we can’t tell the difference anymore in what we see between truth and bullshit.