A comment the other day about communications from fake social media sites--sock puppets. The writer observed it was sometimes hard to identify messages from bots.
My fear--you ain't seen nothing yet. Someone is already linking Chatgpt to their fake media sites, so they can push out messages which seem very real with little effort.
". It's just programmed to seem human." That's a sentence from Ann Althouse, in a post reacting to the frontpage article in the NYTimes recounting an exchange with Microsoft's trial version of a chat bot.
I'm jumping in where I have no knowledge, but that's not the way I understand chat bots like ChatGPT, etc. Aren't they "learning models"? To me that means the programmer is responsible for the IQ of the model, of the bot, but not the content of the responses. So it seems that ChatGPT et.al. will be showing us an average person, "average" based on the context the bot is learning from, which seems to be the usual suspects--white, european, educated etc.
I suppose by controlling the content from which the bot learns the developers can create different personas--say develop a basic personality, then give it a collection of the 500 greatest books in some category with instructions to give the words in them triple the weight.
Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution wrote something, a mere sentence, which impressed me, impressed me so much I misremembered it as "what will robots learn from us?" (Cowen wrote "A.I.s" but "robots" is the term I like, which I think can include all forms of artificial intelligence.)
It's a good question--mostly robots and other forms of artificial intelligence learn what humans have already learned, at least the humans living in the world of robots, etc.That means, by definition, that they will be biased.
I wrote "mostly" because for example robots which learn to walk, learn what it means in terms of their motors, gears, and levers--their bodies--not what it means for humans to walk So robots do experience the world somewhat differently than humans. Possibly robots won't learn some things from us; it's hard to say.
Matt Yglesias has a piece at substack on the need for robots, attacking the thesis that robots will take away workers jobs.
I didn't study it, but it did cause me to think about farming and robots. My impression is that robots and AI are making rapid progress. Robotic milking in dairy, self-driving tractors, flame-throwing weeders, big data and precision agriculture. At least in the world of farming I don't see robots taking jobs. What seems to be happening is two-fold:
