AI is better at fooling humans than ever—and the consequences will be serious.
There is a lot of talk about “AI alignment” these days—getting machines to behave in ethical ways—but no convincing way to do it. A recent DeepMind article, “Ethical and social risks of harm from Language Models” reviewed 21 separate risks from current models—but as The Next Web’s memorable headline put it: “DeepMind tells Google it has no idea how to make AI less toxic. To be fair, neither does any other lab.” Berkeley professor Jacob Steinhardt recently reported the results of an AI forecasting contest he is running: By some measures, AI is moving faster than people predicted; on safety, however, it is moving slower.
Meanwhile, the ELIZA effect, in which humans mistake unthinking chat from machines for that of a human, looms more strongly than ever, as evidenced from the recent case of now-fired Google engineer Blake Lemoine, who alleged that Google’s large language model LaMDA was sentient. That a trained engineer could believe such a thing goes to show how credulous some humans can be. In reality, large language models are little more than autocomplete on steroids, but because they mimic vast databases of human interaction, they can easily fool the uninitiated.
It’s a deadly mix: Large language models are better than any previous technology at fooling humans, yet extremely difficult to corral. Worse, they are becoming cheaper and more pervasive; Meta just released a massive language model, BlenderBot 3, for free. 2023 is likely to see widespread adoption of such systems—despite their flaws.
Meanwhile, there is essentially no regulation on how these systems are used; we may see product liability lawsuits after the fact, but nothing precludes them from being used widely, even in their current, shaky condition.
Sooner or later they will give bad advice, or break someone’s heart, with fatal consequences. Hence my dark but confident prediction that 2023 will bear witness to the first death publicly tied to a chatbot.
Lemoine lost his job; eventually someone will lose a life.
Also: if you're looking for an excellent primer on what ChatGPT is, listen to this Ezra Klein interview with Gary Marcus, the author of the above.
