Can We Please Pump The Breaks On Articles About How AI Will Be Taking Everything Over By This Time Next Week

Posted on Sunday, Feb 5, 2023 by Chris Hayner

Featured in this episode of Chaos Lever

Look. I get it. ChatGPT is super neat. And in terms of regurgitating facts it is something of a miracle that it only gets like 30% of what is asked of it wrong. I have bounced ideas off of ChatGPT regularly since it became an open beta and I have been absolutely gobsmacked by the dumb shit it says. I was doing very important research recently and I asked ChatGPT what James Bond’s middle name was and it said, I shit you not- “James Bond’s middle name is Bond.” WHAT. [Ed.- everyone knows it’s Tyrone. DUH.]

So you’ll forgive me if I’m less than impressed when I hear reports about how “ChatGPT passed a med school exam” or “ChatGPT passed an MBA test,” or the latest: “ChatGPT wrote a bullshit article abstract that was indistinguishable from one that a person wrote.”

So. What.

You don’t get into med school just because of your MCATs. There’s an interview, a body of work, courses you have to pass. And you don’t get an MBA from a good school just from an exam. You also have to do a dissertation or a full scale final project. And writing bullshit abstracts that make it past the half-listening gatekeepers at yes, even journals as august as Nature has been going on for decades.

None of this is new, none of it is exciting, and none of it is going to change a paradigm. Let’s all just calm down a little bit yeah? And we can get back to actual important stuff like shaming advertising company Google and the other tech titans for firing 10’s of thousands of people for no reason.

Here’s a fun fact: Did you know advertising company Google also fired their head of mental health and wellbeing as part of the random 12k that were let go? Go get mad about THAT instead of caring how good ChatGPT is at fucking sporcle.

What? Sporcle??? THAT’s the reference I went with?? God I’m old.