by Dr.Harald Wiesendanger– Klartext
What the mainstream media is hiding
Suddenly on everyone’s lips: An artificial intelligence like ChatGPT has the potential to change our society and culture at least as profoundly as computers, the Internet, and smartphones did. Their possible applications are breathtaking – as are their dangers, including for our healthcare system. We must not stand idly by and watch their further development.
“Doctor Know,” an artificial superintelligence in Steven Spielberg’s visionary feature film “AI” (2001), simply knows everything. Anyone with unanswered questions can consult him – in publicly accessible little houses that resemble mini cinemas. At the push of a button, a curtain opens, and the cartoon-like figure of a professor appears as a hologram, whose appearance is, of course, reminiscent of Einstein. With sweeping gestures, the white-haired, bespectacled figure unraveled everything and everything. And so the robot child David even believes he is capable of knowing the whereabouts of the Blue Fairy: Anyone who turned the wooden puppet Pinocchio into a real boy should also be able to turn David into a flesh-and-blood human, right?
Will we approach ChatGPT with any question mark in a similarly trusting manner? This AI understands text input on any topic and provides answers in everyday language that appear as natural and plausible as if they came from a human dialogue partner. She does her homework and conducts sales talks. She composes songs, writes letters and job applications, lectures, dissertations, poems, and screenplays – if desired in the typical writing style of the respective user. She solves exam questions so well that you usually don’t fail if you rely on her. In the European Parliament, a politician recently gave a speech written entirely by ChatGPT – nobody noticed. She even generates and improves almost error-free computer code – soon her own too.
As a Generative Pretrained Transformer, GPT for short, the famous chatbot consists of special algorithms that can generate content themselves on request. He owes what he is capable of to the principle of machine learning: he was trained with huge data sets in which he recorded statistical patterns. Based on previous examples, it predicts what the next word in a sentence should be – technically similar to the autocomplete in Google search. That’s why mockers call it a “stochastic parrot.”
Released by the US company OpenAI on November 30, 2022, the GPT-3.5 version of the dialog system triggered unparalleled hype. Anyone can communicate directly with him, barrier-free and free of charge. Over a million curious people registered within five days. (1) By January 2023, there were already over a hundred million. (2) This makes ChatGPT by far the fastest-growing consumer app of all time.
ChatGPT’s capabilities are growing just as dynamically as the number of users. In its most recent version, 4.0, which was released in mid-March 2023, the AI can already describe and analyze images and summarize extensive scientific work in no time. She passes exams with distinction. She clarifies complicated tax questions perfectly. Their level of knowledge is still slightly outdated, according to the data their designers have fed them; much of it is still from 2021. But recently, it is starting to access the web. Plugins now enable her to get real-time information from the Internet, from sports scores to stock prices to the latest news. (3) Such interfaces already exist for the online travel agency Expedia, Instacart – a delivery and collection service for groceries -, the travel search engine Kayak, Klarna Shopping, and the software, data, and media company Fiscal Note; New ones are constantly being added, and recently ChatGPT has even been writing them itself. (4) Experts believe that AI will soon be able to open up the entire digitized knowledge of mankind – up to date.
Word gets around in no time at all about what the all-rounder can do. By February 2023, 28 percent of the adult population had heard of ChatGPT; 11 percent stated that they use the system regularly or at least have tried it before. According to a survey published in April, every sixth company already plans to use an AI like ChatGPT; another 23 percent can at least “imagine” this. 70 percent expect that AI for generating texts will be part of everyday working life in the future. A good half anticipate staff cuts; 40 percent even believe that certain professions will become completely superfluous.
What potential does AI believe it has? When I asked, “What will ChatGPT be able to do in the future?” (5), the system told me: “My skills are constantly being developed and improved as my creators continue to refine my architecture and train me with more data.” Among other things, “I will always get better at understanding and generating human-like language, including things like humor, irony, and sarcasm. I will continue to develop my ability to understand and produce natural language in multiple languages, in some cases even surpassing human language proficiency. I will continue to improve my ability to store and retrieve information. This also means I can understand connections better and connect between different pieces of information. I will continue to reason better and make decisions based on complex information, which can be useful in many fields, from medicine to finance to customer service.” ChatGPT will also enhance her “Empathy and Emotional Intelligence: I will improve my ability to recognize human emotions and to react to them.” (6)
Do we really want this? Do we need it? At what price? What is humanity risking?
P.S.: The cover image for this article comes from Microsoft’s AI “Bing Image Creator.” She created it to illustrate a statement I gave her on April 12, 2023: “Artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence.”
(Harald Wiesendanger)
In the next episode: Test case Corona: Does AI make medicine better?
Third and final episode: ChatGPT as a propaganda tool – How does AI illuminate a pandemic?
Remarks
1 How To Geek ChatGPT, https://www.howtogeek.com/871071/what-is-chatgpt/
2 Reuters, 02/02/2023, https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-sets-record-fastest-growing-user-base-analyst-note-2023-02-01/
3 According to a report by ZDnet.com, 3/24/2023, https://www.zdnet.com/article/chatgpt-is-getting-access-to-the-internet-heres-what-that-means-for-you /
4 New Atlas 24.3.2023, https://newatlas.com/technology/chatgpt-plugin-internet-access/
5 Posted on April 12, 2023, in English, which currently speaks ChatGPT a little better than other languages.
6 Translated from English by DeepL on 4/12/2023.
ChatGPT, Bing, Microsoft, OpenAI, Bill Gates, Artificial Intelligence, Chatbot, Doctor Know, KI, Bing Image Creator, Harald Wiesendanger