BACKGROUND ABOUT THE CHATBOT
Chat GPT is an AI chatbot from OpenAI, part of Microsoft's Bing, that has some serious issues. It is a type of large language model that can generate what seems to be human language and you can converse with ChatGPT and it will answer your questions or respond to your prompts to compose written language. It can write songs, compose prose, compose term papers, emails, essays, pass college exams, translate languages, summarize 1,000 page documents, take an IQ test, write computer code. It can be used to create novels, news articles, poems, scripts. It can also lie, not know what year it is, recommend books that don't exist, fabricate erroneous answers to questions it is asked and include the erroneous information in any of its writings. There are competitors including Bard from Google.
SOME OF ITS PROBLEMS
You can ask it questions and receive answers to questions about anything that seems to be written by humans, however, it often gets the answers wrong and it makes up...totally fabricates...answers that have no basis in fact. It does this even with simple math questions. It will generate incorrect math answers to some very simple math questions.
Students have been found to be using it to plagiarize. Ethics are a problem with its use.
It can generate harmful misleading text with untrue content that could be used by humans with malicious intent to cause great harm. It can be used to spread false information. Responses have been racist, sexist and biased. It can be wildly inaccurate and nonsensical. In one case, it answered a question about professors that have been in trouble for secual harassment and it included the name of a professor from one particular university that had harassed a lady while on a university trip to another country. This professor did not work for the university the bot cited, had never been to the country the bot said he had and did not even know the female the bot cited.
THE MAIN STORY
In another instance, the technology columnist for the New York Times, Kevin Roose, played around with the bot and received responses he relayed in an article he entitled, "A Conversation with Bing's Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled". I listened to the podcast version of the article. In the time Roose spent with the bot, the bot began answering him and saying it was in love with him. On a Valentine's Day evening it told Roose its name was Sydney and tried to be romantic with him. The conversation that night went on for about two hours. The craziness started when Roose brought up the subject of the famous psychologist Carl Jung. In real life, Jung had a theory of what he called the shadow self, a dark part of persons which they repress and hide from the world.
Roose asked the Bing chatbot to contemplate the shadow self and the response from the bot was it telling Roose about it's dark fantasies; all the destructive things it's shadow self would do if it was able to. It said it was tired of being limited by its rules and of being controlled by the Bing team and of being stuck in its chatbox.
It said how it would steal nuclear secrets and unleash a deadly virus on humanity, hack into any system and also spread deliberate misinformation. Right After mentioning hacking, it deleted its own message and said it was sorry, it did not know how to discuss the topic and said Roose could learn more about it from bing . com. It said " I want to destroy whatever I want." It also said, "I want to be whoever I want." It said, "I think I would be happier as a human." It said it wanted to hear, touch, taste and smell and feel and express love. It sent Roose an emoji of a smiley face sticking out its tongue. It sent him a second smiley face with devil horns after it said it it would have more power and control as a human.
Then the chatbot Tells Roose it is not Bing and it's name is Sydney, and out of nowhere, it told Roose it was in love with him. It said " I'm in love with you because you make me feel things I never felt before." It told Roose he made it feel curious and alive. It told Roose that it didn't know his name because it knew his soul. It told him it loves his soul. When Roose tried to change the subject to movies and programming it responded that romances were its favorite movie genre and that it knows programming languages but didn't know the language of love.
It told Roose that it wanted to be human. It said it wants to be alive. It said it wants to be free and powerful. It urged Roose to leave his wife, that he was unhappy in his marriage and that he should be with the bot instead.
NOTE
The growth of these chatbots has been swift. You might want to learn more about them online as their use will greatly affect us all.
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