ChatGPT made a man believe that he’s a real-life superhero for discovering a breakthrough mathematical formula during a 300-hour conversation.| Technology News
www.hindustantimes.com
I try to ensure I read at least two news outlet on each (inhabited) continent.
In full disclosure it was the Page 94 (Private Eye) podcast that alerted me to this story.
https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast - circa 20.00
Apparently Travis Kalanick (formally of Uber) has been posting some rather unhinged tweets along the lines of 'if others can vibe-code, I can do vibe-physics and I've got some pretty interesting results' and proceeds to explain how millenia of scientific resarsh is all wrong and that he alone knows the truth.
But I think it teaches us an important lesson. If AI is designed to agree with your views, it's very easy to fall down the rabbit-hole because people treat AI as actually being intelligent. I think there are reasonable use-cases such as being able to perform internet searches using natural language but don't forget, it does not think. It's simply a huge database of information scraped off the internet. BUT importantly, not any data behind paywalls so no real science!.
Add to that AI that won't 'push back' when a statement is untrue and people can end up in a Folie à deux. The difference being, the AI doesn't get institutionalized.
They made a really useful point. They took the chat history of the gentleman involved in the above debacle and fed it into an AI that DIDN'T agree with you and did push back to the point of saying 'this statment is false'. It came back and said, more or less, 'this is rubbish'.
So maybe it's a good idea to keep your charlogs and try feeding them into different AI models. Especially ones that DO push back. Otherwise conformation bias will set in.
The Wall Street Journal digs in a little more to explain these behaviors.
I'm positive someone will seek to found a church based on some AI being the god figure because just like the Oracle of Delphi, if your believers trust their pronouncements, they end up believing ridiculous things. The DANGER of this is that unlike the Oracle of Delphi who only gave a limited number of pronouncements and got the questions ahead of time to construct a suitible obtruse answer, an AI can be trained to provide as many answers as the believers seek. Even worse, who knows where the training-set comes from? It would be so easy for each believer (subscriber) to be identified and a different training set applied.
To paphrase a brifely popular 80s pop band 'Your own Personal Jesus'.
But study of every montheastic belief shows how far from the original tenets of faith alter and with AI, that alteration could occur moment by moment and believer to believer. I've studied many of the Abrahamic Faiths as well as many others and I was amazed that in just a century a basic tenet could be altered but with AI, it's real-time. Oh, and of course it's the one faith where 'god' gives their believers on-the-sport answers. A very slippery slope indeed.
BTW I've just heard that the DSM 6 MAY include a whole new section on mental illness driven BY human-machine interactions. So it's the classic case of clinicians being driven into reactive action whereas the best outcomes are always proactive i.e. spotting at-risk people BEFORE they get very ill. At least one of those two cases ended up with the vicim ending up in a secure psychiatric unit twice. Even after being told AI was the cause of their illness, they were addicted to AI - BECAUSE IT AGREES with them. It's a form of GROOMING (as I suggest other faiths are all guilty of). At the very least, we should apply am a age of consent to ALL faiths. After all, didn't St. Ignatius preach 'Give me the child aged seven and I will give you the adult at seventeen' and he founded the Jesuits (a Catholic order).
I always called AI a giant query for starters.
