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There’s One Big Thing the ChatGPT Critics Keep Missing
Willful ignorance or magical thinking, they keep leaving out an important point.
“…all they do is predict which word the training data says is most likely to come next… It’s just a parrot, choosing words it’s heard before out of a big ass hat.”
That’s from Adam Conover’s recent YouTube rant against the evils of AI chatbots. It’s not an original argument; you can hear variations on the theme throughout the discourse of ChatGPT.
Kind of ironic, in the dramatic sense of the term.
Mr. Conover goes on to complain that AI “…doesn’t know the difference between a reliable expert and a biased idiot because it doesn’t even know that people exist.”
This is true.
It is also true that humans deliberately and frequently ignore that people exist in favor of a better stock dividend, balance sheet, or productivity percentage point.
Artificial intelligence, at least, has the excuse that it was never a person in the first place. Yet whether it’s cladding in a high-rise tenement or water in Flint Michigan, knowing that one’s actions are hurting fellow humans doesn’t seem to be much of a deterrent when there’s the beautiful allure of the balance sheet.
