{"id":217,"date":"2022-12-07T03:58:02","date_gmt":"2022-12-07T03:58:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/260web.com\/news\/new-chatbot-has-everyone-talking-to-it\/"},"modified":"2022-12-07T03:58:02","modified_gmt":"2022-12-07T03:58:02","slug":"new-chatbot-has-everyone-talking-to-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/260web.com\/news\/new-chatbot-has-everyone-talking-to-it\/","title":{"rendered":"New chatbot has everyone talking to it"},"content":{"rendered":"

New chatbot has everyone talking to it<\/p>\n

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\"An<\/picture><\/span>Getty Images<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
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By Chris Vallance<\/div>\n
Technology reporter<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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A new chatbot has passed one million users in less than a week, the project behind it says.<\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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ChatGPT was publicly released on Wednesday by OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research firm whose founders included Elon Musk.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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But the company warns it can produce problematic answers and exhibit biased behaviour.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Open AI says it’s “eager to collect user feedback to aid our ongoing work to improve this system”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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ChatGPT is the latest in a series of AIs which the firm refers to as GPTs, an acronym which stands for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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To develop the system, an early version was fine-tuned through conversations with human trainers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The system also learned from access to Twitter data according to a tweet from Elon Musk who is no longer part of OpenAI’s board. The Twitter boss wrote that he had paused access “for now”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The results have impressed many who’ve tried out the chatbot. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman revealed the level of interest in the artificial conversationalist in a tweet.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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ChatGPT launched on wednesday. today it crossed 1 million users!<\/p>\n

\u2014 Sam Altman (@sama) December 5, 2022<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.<\/span>View original tweet on Twitter<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The project says the chat format allows the AI to answer “follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises and reject inappropriate requests”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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A journalist for technology news site Mashable who tried out ChatGPT reported it is hard to provoke the model into saying offensive things.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Mike Pearl wrote that in his own tests “its taboo avoidance system is pretty comprehensive”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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However, OpenAI warns that “ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Training the model to be more cautious, says the firm, causes it to decline to answer questions that it can answer correctly.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Briefly questioned by the BBC for this article, ChatGPT revealed itself to be a cautious interviewee capable of expressing itself clearly and accurately in English. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Did it think AI would take the jobs of human writers? No – it argued that “AI systems like myself can help writers by providing suggestions and ideas, but ultimately it is up to the human writer to create the final product”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Asked what would be the social impact of AI systems such as itself, it said this was “hard to predict”. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Had it been trained on Twitter data? It said it did not know.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Only when the BBC asked a question about HAL, the malevolent fictional AI from the film 2001, did it seem troubled.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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<\/span><\/span>OpenAI\/BBC<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

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Although that was most likely just a random error – unsurprising perhaps, given the volume of interest.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Its master’s voice<\/span><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
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Other firms which opened conversational AIs to general use, found they could be persuaded to say offensive or disparaging things.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Many are trained on vast databases of text scraped from the internet, and consequently they learn from the worst as well as the best of human expression.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Meta’s BlenderBot3 was highly critical of Mark Zuckerberg in a conversation with a BBC journalist.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In 2016, Microsoft apologised after an experimental AI Twitter bot called “Tay” said offensive things on the platform.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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And others have found that sometimes success in creating a convincing computer conversationalist brings unexpected problems. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Google’s Lamda was so plausible that a now-former employee concluded it was sentient, and deserving of the rights due to a thinking, feeling, being, including the right not to be used in experiments against its will. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Jobs threat<\/span><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
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ChatGPT’s ability to answer questions caused some users to wonder if it might replace Google.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Others asked if journalists’ jobs were at risk. Emily Bell of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism worried that readers might be deluged with “bilge”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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ChatGPT proves my greatest fears about AI and journalism – not that bona fide journalists will be replaced in their work – but that these capabilities will be used by bad actors to autogenerate the most astounding amount of misleading bilge, smothering reality<\/p>\n

\u2014 emily bell (@emilybell) December 4, 2022<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.<\/span>View original tweet on Twitter<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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One question-and-answer site has already had to curb a flood of AI-generated answers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Others invited ChatGPT to speculate on AI’s impact on the media.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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How about that. chatGPT’s advice to journalists. pic.twitter.com\/d6By4Tpnzx<\/p>\n

\u2014 Dominic Ligot (@docligot) December 3, 2022<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.<\/span>View original tweet on Twitter<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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General purpose AI systems, like ChatGPT and others, raise a number of ethical and societal risks, according to Carly Kind of the Ada Lovelace Institute.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Among the potential problems of concern to Ms Kind are that AI might perpetuate disinformation, or “disrupt existing institutions and services – ChatGDT might be able to write a passable job application, school essay or grant application, for example”. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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There are also, she said, questions around copyright infringement “and there are also privacy concerns, given that these systems often incorporate data that is unethically collected from internet users”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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However, she said they may also deliver “interesting and as-yet-unknown societal benefits”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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ChatGPT learns from human interactions, and OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman tweeted that those working in the field also have much to learn.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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AI has a “long way to go, and big ideas yet to discover. We will stumble along the way, and learn a lot from contact with reality. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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“It will sometimes be messy. We will sometimes make really bad decisions, we will sometimes have moments of transcendent progress and value,” he wrote.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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More on this story<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n