this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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Let's be clear on where the responsibility belongs, here. LLMs are neither alive nor sapient. They themselves have no more "rights" than a toaster. The question is whether the humans training the AIs have the right to feed them such-and-such data.
The real problem is the way these systems are being anthropomorphized. Keep your attention firmly on the man behind the curtain.
Yes, these are the same people who are charging a fee to use their AI and profiting. Placing the blame and discussion on the AI itself conveniently overlooks a lot here.
You know, I think ChatGPT is way ahead of a toaster. Maybe it's more like a small animal of some kind.
One could equally claim that the toaster was ahead, because it does something useful in the physical world. Hmm. Is a robot dog more alive than a Tamagotchi?
There are a lot of subjects where ChatGPT knows more than I do.
Does it know more than someone who has studied that subject their whole life? Of course not. But those people aren't available to talk to me on a whim. ChatGPT is available, and it's really useful. Far more useful than a toaster.
As long as you only use it for things where a mistake won't be a problem - it's a great tool. And you can also use it for "risky" decisions but take the information it gave you to an expert for verification before acting.
Sorry to break it to you, but it doesn't "know" anything except what text is most likely to come after the text you just typed. It's an autocomplete. A very sophisticated one, granted, but it has no notion of "fact" and no real understanding of the content of what it's saying.
Saying that it knows what it's spouting back to you is exactly what I warned against up above: anthropomorphization. People did this with ELIZA too, and it's even more dangerous now than it was then.