The dangers of ChatGPT according to ChatGPT
I asked ChatGPT to explain what it was.
I am ChatGPT, a large language model developed by OpenAI. I am designed to understand and generate natural language text in response to user inputs. Essentially, I can engage in conversation with humans and respond to a wide range of questions and prompts on various topics. I have been trained on a large corpus of text data and can generate text that is often coherent and grammatically correct, although I may occasionally make mistakes or produce unexpected responses. My purpose is to assist and communicate with users, provide information, and help them with their questions and tasks.
I then asked it what the dangers of large language models like itself are.
There are several potential dangers associated with large language models like ChatGPT:
Bias: Language models like ChatGPT are trained on massive amounts of data, which can reflect and perpetuate societal biases, such as racial or gender bias. As a result, the models can generate biased language or make biased decisions.
Misinformation: ChatGPT can generate text that appears to be accurate and authoritative, even if it is not. If users rely on ChatGPT for information without fact-checking it, they may be exposed to misinformation.
Malicious Use: Large language models can also be used to generate convincing fake content such as deepfakes or phishing emails. This could be used by malicious actors to deceive and manipulate individuals, companies, and even governments.
Privacy Concerns: The large amount of data required to train a language model like ChatGPT raises concerns about privacy, as personal information could be inadvertently included in the data, or the model could be used to extract sensitive information from users.
Unintended Consequences: There may be unforeseen consequences that emerge from the widespread use of large language models, such as job displacement, economic inequality, or changes in the way people communicate and interact with each other.
It is important to address these concerns and ensure that the development and use of large language models like ChatGPT are responsible, transparent, and ethical.
I want to take a minute to focus on the second point. Search-engine style results on platforms like Google, Facebook, YouTube contain a lot of misinformation. But because they link to results, they give us a chance to evaluate how seriously we should take the sources being presented to us as the most relevant ones for the questions we are trying to answer.
ChatGPT in its effort to provide a conversational response hides the sources of its answers. This makes it difficult to evaluate how seriously we should take them. At the same time it speaks with a surety that might make its users less likely to look up other sources.
Some approaches to improve this would be to link to all the source material it's pulling answers from. And since it's conveying a specific opinion, some kind of score that indicates how confident we should be about it's answer.
It's still definitely worth playing around with. You can sign up on the OpenAI website.