Inside the heart of ChatGPT’s darkness: Nightmare on LLM Street

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By Gary Marcus | Feb 28, 2023

Image courtesy of and under license from Shutterstock.com

As ChatGPT keeps making waves and more is known about its abilities - and its shortfalls - terrifying possibilities loom, particularly if OpenAI cannot fix its bugs. Still, even if the bot goes down in history as nothing but a publicity stunt it has already redefined possibility.

VANCOUVER, CANADA -

This article has been adapted from the original version, which can be found on Gary Marcus' Substack.

In hindsight, ChatGPT may come to be seen as the greatest publicity stunt in AI history, an intoxicating glimpse at a future that may actually take years to realize - kind of like a 2012-vintage driverless car demo, but this time with a foretaste of an ethical guardrail that will take years to perfect.

What ChatGPT delivered in spades that its predecessors like Microsoft Tay - released March 23, 2016 and withdrawn March 24 for toxic behavior - and Meta’s Galactica - released November 16, 2022 and withdrawn November 18 - could not was an illusion, a sense that the problem of toxic spew was finally coming under control. ChatGPT rarely says anything overtly racist, and simple requests for antisemitism and outright lies are often rebuffed.

Indeed, at times it can seem so politically correct that the right wing has become enraged. Elon Musk, for one, has expressed concern that the system has become an agent of wokeness:

However - as is often the case - the reality is actually more nuanced and complex than that.

The thing to remember - as I have emphasized many tim

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