Two frightening things before breakfast
We recorded 8 claims from this post. 5 were checked against evidence. 3 can’t be checked. 4 more are held. Read the post at its source.
Claims from this post (8)
In the order they appear in the post. Each quotation is the speaker’s words in this post. A label such as “Supported” or “Can’t be checked” is the claim’s current assessment; its page has the evidence and the reasons.
Assessment: SupportedSaid
Observation
“What I learned this morning is that retraining GPT-3 in some new political direction isn’t a half-million dollar proposition.”
Our reading: Retraining GPT-3 to take on a new political slant costs far less than half a million dollars.
No horizon Evidence as of
Limitation: The results and costs are self-reported; independent billing verification is unavailable.
Assessment: SupportedSaid
Observation
“Oh, and for good measure the tooling for spreading automatically generated misinformation is getting more efficient, too:”
Our reading: Tools for spreading automatically generated misinformation are becoming more efficient.
No horizon Evidence as of
Limitation: The evidence is a vendor announcement, without a controlled before-and-after efficiency measurement.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Conditional forecast
“It’s not hard to see how someone unsophisticated might be totally taken in, by this prevaricating but potentially emotionally damaging hunk of silicon, potentially to their peril, should the bot prove to be fickle.”
Our reading: An unsophisticated user might be taken in by the Bing chatbot and harmed if the bot proves fickle.
No horizon
Only if: user is unsophisticated
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Recommendation or value judgment
“We should be worried; not in the “some day” sense, but right now.”
Our reading: People should be worried about the dangers of chatbots right now, not at some future date.
No horizon
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Observation
“There was a broken image link, and I went so fast I neglected to mention the personally salient fact that Bing had lied about me, claiming that I believe that “Bing’s AI was more accurate and reliable than Bard”, when I never said any such thing.”
Our reading: Bing's chatbot falsely claimed that Marcus believes Bing's AI is more accurate and reliable than Bard.
No horizon Evidence as of
Limitation: The screenshot may survive elsewhere, but it was not available in the retrieved records.
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Observation
“Microsoft can (at least to a first approximation) do whatever the hell it wants with Bing.”
Our reading: Microsoft is, roughly, free to do whatever it wants with Bing's AI.
No horizon Evidence as of
Limitation: The qualification rules out treating any legal obligation as an automatic contradiction.
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Observation
“There are almost no regulations here; we are living in the Wild AI West.”
Our reading: There is almost no regulation of AI chatbots.
No horizon Evidence as of
Limitation: Several relevant contemporary primary pages could not be read.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Observation
“Strictly speaking, as I discussed in Inside the Heart of ChatGPT’s Darkness, ChatGPT doesn’t literally lean left or right per se, because it doesn’t have political ideas.”
Our reading: ChatGPT has no political ideas, so strictly speaking it does not literally lean left or right.
No horizon
Held from this post (4)
These records did not pass every check, so nothing about them is published. Held is not a finding.
- The two reviews read the claim differently
- The two reviews read the claim differently
- The two reviews reached different assessments. Our reading, not assessed: ChatGPT's political outputs are a stochastic function of the training corpus it parrots.
- Attribution is uncertain