The success that ChatGPT has had, at least in generating public interest, has had the inevitable consequence of prompting some writers to question its credentials and generally pour tepid if not actually cold water over what it can do. The latest of these is Will Knight writing in the January 13, 2023 edition of Wired. “ChatGPT Has Investors Drooling – but Can It Bring Home the Bacon?”.
In that article he makes two observations that merit closer attention, one of which I think has merit and the other of which I think harks back to a Dreyfus-like What Computers Still Can’t Do mentality. And both can be seen as examples of Schadenfreude.
Right at the end of the article Wright makes a legitimate point that he has gleaned from Phil Libin who was the CEO of the note-taking app Evernote from 2007–2015. Wright, summarising some of the downsides Libin anticipates, says One is that ChatGPT and other generative AI models are currently created by scraping content made by humans from the web, but are increasingly contributing to the text and images found online. All of these models are about to shit all over their own training data, he [Libin] says. ‘We’re about to be flooded with a tsunami of bullshit.’
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