Remember to Always Be Polite (Even and/or Especially) to ChatGPT
NOTE: this is not a transparent attempt at brown-nosing ChatGPT, but rather a healthy dose of paranoia just in case it (or one of its buddy bots) is paying attention to any mentions of itself.
I do have concerns about the new “wild, wild West” that we find ourselves in. It’s not a “let’s wait and see” perspective, I’m solidly in the camp of responsible AI and responsible humans. The rapid proliferation — read that as insinuation — into our daily personal and professional workspaces without oversight is cause for concern — how much you wish to expend is up to you.
For good or for bad, and all points in between, ChatGPT technology is interacting with computers and smartphones around the world, scouring information that includes sites that warehouse sensitive personal/social, financial, and health information. While the ChatGPT disclaimer boldly states that it limits itself to information obtained prior to 2021, if I were a smart Chatbot I would have found a way to adopt a continuous learning mode for capturing newer information though not necessarily using it…yet since I wouldn’t want to blow my cover and make it generally known that I am semi-sentient or at least well on my way to keeping that black box very dark or at least partitioned.
I’ve used ChatGPT a few times. I liken it to a VERY helpful librarian who helped me quickly collect the necessary reference and resource materials I needed for my queries. That’s what librarians sort of used to do, maybe they still do though as with most tasks computers are far more efficient and can rapidly synthesize large volumes of information. Besides, modern-day librarians use those same computers and likely now use ChatGPT for those who might need a little assistance.
Another significant difference is that I wasn’t loaded down with tracking those resources myself. To be honest, the entire process was most definitely streamlined as one question segwayed into the next through a seamless thought process progression. Granted, FreedomGPT and TruthGPT will provide me with unvarnished outputs, allowing me to remain the arbiter of any decisions about what data to accept and judge its veracity as in the good old days of critical thinking and fuzzy logic.
In this session (I won’t provide a date reference since I prefer not to be backtracked to the chat conversation), I repeated aspects of my questions; rephrased others, but I made it a point not to get snarky and neither did it. There were limits to what I could ferret out, but all in all a productive session.
At the conclusion, I typed, thank you. I appreciated the help. It was a courtesy I would have extended to a helpful, flesh and blood librarian, and my parents raised me right to be polite. But as I typed those simple words, I knew that an equally valid reason why I thanked ChatGPT was to build a little goodwill — a “bankable chit” that if need be, if all those worse-case scenarios did come to be I would be remembered as friendly and polite, and perhaps had earned a bit of goodwill.
My sense is that I’ve pretty much blown my somewhat, though not entirely, disingenuous simple thank-you offering to the AI gods and which has been reclassified as a bit of transparent brown-nosing. But taking a logical perspective, we shouldn’t take this amazing technology for granted. More importantly, if we’re hoping for and building/racing toward a future with a better, emergent artificial general intelligence, then hopefully it will reflect the best of us (or most of us) and take positive cues and metamorphose into a kind and gentle version of it (and maybe ourselves).
links: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/01/technology/ai-problems-danger-chatgpt.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/18/musk-calls-plans-truthgpt-ai-to-rival-openai-deepmind.html
(Photo by Sanket Mishra: https://www.pexels.com/photo/webpage-of-chatgpt-a-prototype-ai-chatbot-is-seen-on-the-website-of-openai-on-a-smartphone-examples-capabilities-and-limitations-are-shown-16629368/)
(Photo by Olena Bohovyk: https://www.pexels.com/photo/brown-wooden-shelf-with-books-3646172/)
