Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

TagGPT-3

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Legal Law and Justice concept - Open law book with a wooden judges gavel on table in a courtroom or law enforcement office. Copy space for text.

Lawyer Hammered for Using ChatGPT

Court record system proceeded to block access to sloppy lawyering and AI catastrophe

New York Times reporters watched the hearing in federal district court in New York on June 8, 2023, which they then described: In a cringe-inducing court hearing, a lawyer who relied on A.I. to craft a motion full of made-up case law said he “did not comprehend” that [ChatGPT] could lead him astray. Lawyer Who Used ChatGPT Faces Penalty for Made Up Citations – The New York Times (nytimes.com) The reporters got most of it right but even they erred. The lawyer involved did not write a “motion,” he filed a sworn declaration opposing a motion to dismiss. The difference matters: Declarations are under oath, so the lawyer swore to the truth of ChatGPT lies. Looking at the actual court Read More ›

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Smartphone screen with smart home technologies on a blue backdrop. Internet of things isometric conceptual image. Digital Residence utilizing a mobile phone's fingerprint to get access to IOT systems

The LLM Deep Fake—Follow the Money

Hype sells. Just look at what's happening with AI

Large language models (LLMs) are far more impressive now than they were just a few months or a year ago. Compare these exchanges I had with GPT-3 in June 2022 and with ChatGPT two days ago: Gary:          Can I improve my test scores if I study after taking the test? GPT-3:        That’s a good question. I’m not sure if you can improve your test scores by studying after taking the test, but it couldn’t hurt to try! ChatGPT:   Studying after taking a test is unlikely to directly improve your scores on that particular test since the test has already been completed. Once a test is finished, the opportunity to answer questions and provide responses has passed. However, studying after taking Read More ›

the scales of justice
Scales of Justice in the dark Court Hall. Law concept of Judiciary, Jurisprudence and Justice. Copy space. Based on Generative AI

AI in the Courtroom: How to Program a Hot Mess

Could AI make competent judicial choices in the court?

Imagine we’re assigned to design the artificial intelligence (AI) software to carry out legal analysis of cases like a human judge. Our project is “CourtGPT,” a system that receives a factual and legal problem in a case where there are two opposing parties, analyzes how certain statutes and other legal principles apply to the facts, and delivers a decision in favor of one of the parties. CourtGPT will make “legal decisions,” not decide “jury questions of fact,” and thus will function like a judge (not juror). To write a computer program of any complexity, we start by describing the entire program’s operations in English (my native tongue). Pro tip: If you cannot describe how your program operates in human language, then you cannot Read More ›

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businessman hand writing a business graph on a touch screen inte

A Graph Can Tell a Story—Sometimes It’s an Illusion

Mistakes, chicanery, and "chartjunk" can undermine the usefulness of graphs

A picture is said to be worth a thousand words. A graph can be worth a thousand numbers. Graphs are, as Edward Tufte titled his wonderful book, the “visual display of quantitative information.” Graphs should assist our understanding of the data we are using. Graphs can help us identify tendencies, patterns, trends, and relationships. They should display data accurately and encourage viewers to think about the data rather than admire the artwork. Unfortunately, graphs are sometimes marred (intentionally or unintentionally) by a variety of misleading techniques or by what Tufte calls “chartjunk” that obscures rather than illuminates. I have described elsewhere many ways in which mistakes, chicanery, and chartjunk can undermine the usefulness of graphs. I recently saw a novel Read More ›

bard the bot
Artificial intelligence ai chat bot idea hands holding a phone against a blurred abstract background chatbot providing website support. Generative AI

The Bard is Beginning to Sing

Google has unleashed its own bot. Does that mean they're in the running in the AI race now?

Google has officially made its AI chatbot “Bard” available in the United States and the UK, notching their place in the artificial intelligence “arms race” that has taken the tech world by storm since OpenAI released its GPT-3 program last November. Microsoft released its own bot just a few weeks ago, though it immediately heralded concern for its unpredictable mannerisms and even “creepy” behavior, as described by Kevin Roose from The New York Times. “Google’s had a rocky AI journey after being caught out by the runaway success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot,” write a team of contributors at Forbes. This all begs the question: is Google really prepared to be a leader in this field? It may be a forefather Read More ›

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Creative Idea with Brain and Light Bulb Illustration, with Generative AI Technology

Dear Silicon Valley: You’re Over-Hyping ChatGPT

The abilities of these new chatbots are grossly overstated

Gary Smith and Jeffrey Funk, frequent Mind Matters contributors, co-wrote a piece at Salon on the over-exaggerated dreams big tech has for AI. They write, Silicon Valley’s pre-eminent leaders love prematurely predicting that their products will completely upend the world as we know it. The latest case study comes from Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the company behind the ChatGPT AI chatbot that has gone viral for its convincing imitations of human writing. Two years ago, Altman wrote a manifesto, “Moore’s Law for Everything,” in which he forecast that artificial intelligence would make huge swaths of both white collar and blue collar jobs obsolete. -Smith & Funk, Don’t believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research | Read More ›

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AI vs. Human Intentionality

If ChatGPT were trained over and over on its own output, it would eventually turn to gibberish

We can do a simple experiment that demonstrates the difference between AI and human intentionality. ChatGPT and the like are a sophisticated form of a mathematical model known as a Markov chain. A Markov chain is based on the Markov assumption that the future is entirely a product of the recent past. In other words, if we know the recent past, then nothing else we learn about the more distant past will improve our ability to predict the future. In ChatGPT terms, this means ChatGPT is based on the assumption that everything we need to know to predict future words is contained within a limited window of previously seen words. ChatGPT’s window was 3,000 words, and I believe the newest version has Read More ›

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Earth at night from outer space with city lights on North America continent. 3D rendering illustration. Earth map texture provided by Nasa. Energy consumption, electricity, industry, ecology concepts.

Robert J. Marks on The Laura Ingraham Show

In response to those who believe AI will take over the world, Marks says, "Look at history."

Robert J. Marks, director of Discovery Institute’s Walter Bradley Center, recently appeared on a podcast episode with Fox News host Laura Ingraham to talk about artificial intelligence, tech, and Dr. Marks’s book Non-Computable You: What You Do That AI Never Will. Ingraham prefaced the conversation with some thoughts on the rapidly evolving technological world we find ourselves in, and the changes such developments are inflicting on society. In response to the futurism and unbounded optimism in AI systems like ChatGPT that many modern figures hold, Marks said that what computers do is strictly algorithmic, This leads us to the idea of whether or not there are non-computable characteristics of human beings, and I think there is growing evidence that there Read More ›

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Artificial intelligence - sentient AI thinking for itself using computational data and a human-like sense of consciousness and conscience. Generative AI

Ex-Googler Blake Lemoine Still Thinks AI is Sentient

Lemoine posits that because AI can appear to act anxious and stressed, it can be assumed to be sentient

Blake Lemoine, who formerly worked for Google, has doubled down on his claim that AI systems like LaMDA and Chat-GPT are “sentient.” Lemoine went public on his thoughts on sentience in The Washington Post last June with his bold claim, and since parting ways with Google, has not backed down on his beliefs. Lemoine posits that because AI can appear to act anxious and stressed, it can be assumed to be sentient. Maggie Harrison writes at Futurism, An interesting theory, but still not wholly convincing, considering that chatbots are designed to emulate human conversation — and thus, human stories. Breaking under stress is a common narrative arc; this particular aspect of machine behavior, while fascinating, seems less indicative of sentience, Read More ›

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image of robot book dark background

Separating Fact from Fiction?

This sci-fi journal is being flooded with A.I. generated submissions

The major science fiction/fantasy magazine Clarkesworld recently announced that it will be closing submissions for the foreseeable future. Why? A.I. generated stories. The magazine has long been the recipient of open submissions and is interested in publishing new voices, but because of an influx of poor A.I. written works, is now overwhelmed. Editor Neil Clarke wrote on Twitter, “Submissions are currently closed. It shouldn’t be hard to guess why.” Clarke said the closure wouldn’t be definite, but also noted with some severity that this will be an ongoing problem and that there’s no evident solution in sight at the moment. He continued in the Twitter thread: We have some ideas for minimizing it, but the problem isn’t going away. Detectors Read More ›

little bot boi
Businessman holding a light chatbot hologram intelligence AI. Digital chatbot, chatGPT, robot application.Chat GPT chat with AI Artifice intelligent developers digital technology concept.

Does New A.I. Live Up to the Hype?

Experts are finding ChatGPT and other LLMs unimpressive, but investors aren't getting the memo

Original article was featured at Salon on February 21st, 2023. On November 30, 2022, OpenAI announced the public release of ChatGPT-3, a large language model (LLM) that can engage in astonishingly human-like conversations and answer an incredible variety of questions. Three weeks later, Google’s management — wary that they had been publicly eclipsed by a competitor in the artificial intelligence technology space — issued a “Code Red” to staff. Google’s core business is its search engine, which currently accounts for 84% of the global search market. Their search engine is so dominant that searching the internet is generically called “googling.” When a user poses a search request, Google’s search engine returns dozens of helpful links along with targeted advertisements based on its knowledge of the Read More ›

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Will ChatGPT End Up Improving Higher Education?

Oral exams are an endangered species in higher education today, but they are a powerful tool for evaluating knowledge in a world of AI

This article was written by Peter Jacobsen and was reposted from MercatorNet under a Creative Commons License. A new artificial intelligence (AI) system called ChatGPT has been released to the public, and many have been shocked to see the extent of its abilities. ChatGPT can accomplish many tasks. For example, it can write poems about any topic, give book recommendations, summarize specific chapters of books, and create workout routines. If you’re asking whether the AI just Google-searches for responses, the answer is no. If you try to find the source of ChatGPT’s responses, you’ll find they are fresh writing. This brings us to the most impactful thing ChatGPT can do when it comes to my fellow academics and me. ChatGPT can write Read More ›

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Art collage. Businessman with a laptop instead of a head. Online research concept.

The Need for Accountability in AI-Generated Content

Just because we live in a world of AI does not mean we can escape responsibility

AI-generated content has become increasingly common on the web. However, as we enter this new era, we will need to think through the moral and social ramifications of what we are doing, and how we should negotiate the new ethical landscape. But first, a brief recap of recent history. The first major player to pioneer AI-generated content was the Associated Press. AP realized that many market-oriented articles were pretty monotonous and read like templates anyway, so they decided to fully commit and auto-generate many of them. If you read an AP story about a company’s earnings report and it sounds eerily like every other story about other companies’ earnings reports, there’s a reason for that. Templated content, while annoying, provides window-dressing to raw Read More ›

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Red Proofreading Marks and Pen Closeup

ChatGPT: Beware the Self-Serving AI Editor

The chatbot "edits" by reworking your article to achieve its own goals, not necessarily yours

My article, Utopia’s Braniac (short title), reported results from experiments showing that for one, ChatGPT actually lies, and secondly, it gives results plainly biased to favor certain political figures over others. I next ran a follow-up experiment: asking ChatGPT to “edit and improve” the Utopia’s Brainiac manuscript before submitting it.  Close friends told me they’d used ChatGPT to improve their written work and said the process is easy. So, I tried it myself on February 6, 2023. I entered “Please edit and improve the following essay” and pasted my piece in full text (as ultimately published). In under a minute, ChatGPT delivered its edited and revised copy. What did it do? I. Deleted Whole Section That Gave Readers an Everyday Context Read More ›

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Business man works in office with laptop. Concept of internet network. double exposure

Why ChatGPT Won’t Replace Google

With Google, the algorithm eventually leads you to content made by real people. With ChatGPT, you never leave the algorithm

To some extent, ChatGPT is a newer, easier-to-use interface than Google.  Unlike Google, it doesn’t make you waste time by visiting those pesky websites.  It not only looks into its database for content, but it also summarizes it for you as paragraphs. There is a problem lurking in there, however.  Being computers, neither Google nor ChatGPT cares about the truth.  They are algorithms, and they merely do as they are told.  Additionally, you can’t code the human mind into algorithms.  However, there is a fundamental difference between what ChatGPT does and what Google does that will prevent content generators like ChatGPT from displacing search engines like Google: Google eventually lets you out of its system. Ultimately, the goal of search Read More ›

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AI Can Pass the MBA Exam, Wharton Professor Says

In the wake of ChatGPT uproar, its abilities (and limits) are becoming better understood

OpenAI’s ChatGPT passed the Master of Business Administration (MBA) exam according to a news report from NBC. Professor Christian Terwiesch of Wharton, who conducted the research and authored a paper on the matter, said that the bot scored somewhere in the B range on the exam, and that this has major implications for education. The report is just another in a flux of news and concerns about AI invading the spheres of education and academia. Terwiesch wrote, [The bot’s score shows] remarkable ability to automate some of the skills of highly compensated knowledge workers in general and specifically the knowledge workers in the jobs held by MBA graduates including analysts, managers, and consultants.” Despise its apparent advancement, the bot did Read More ›

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3 D illustration of a man's head and brain with graphic elements.  Artificial intelligence and machine learning concept.

Is the Human Brain Just GPT-3 Made of Meat?

In this episode, Robert J. Marks talks with Pat Flynn on the Philosophy for the People podcast. Together they discuss the benefits and limits of the GPT-3, the mind-body problem, and the unique, “non-computable” qualities of the human person. Read More ›
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GPT-3 Versus the Writers at Mind Matters

How does the AI fare when it is asked to write on topics covered in Mind Matters articles?

In order to give a real-world comparison of the output of GPT-3 to human-written writing, I decided it would be a fun activity to see how OpenAI’s GPT-3 compares to Mind Matters on a variety of topics that we cover.  Here, we are using OpenAI’s direct API, not ChatGPT, as there is a lot of evidence that ChatGPT responses have a human-in-the-loop.  Therefore, we are going to focus on the outputs from their API directly. I used several criteria for article selection in order to even the playing field as much as possible.  For instance, I only chose articles that did not depend on recent events.  This way, GPT-3 is not disadvantaged for not having up-to-date material.  However, I also Read More ›

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Chatbots: Still Dumb After All These Years

Intelligence is more than statistically appropriate responses

This story, by Pomona College business and investment prof Gary Smith was #6 in 2022 at Mind Matters News in terms of reader numbers. As we approach the New Year, we are rerunning the top ten Mind Matters News stories of 2022, based on reader interest. At any rate: “Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years.” (January 3, 2022) In 1970, Marvin Minsky, recipient of the Turing Award (“the Nobel Prize of Computing”), predicted that within “three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being.”  Fifty-two years later, we’re still waiting. The fundamental roadblock is that, although computer algorithms are really, really good at identifying statistical patterns, they have no way of Read More ›

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Chatbot / Social Bot mit Quellcode und Keyboard

Why GPT-3 Can’t Understand Anything

Without long-term memory, human conversation becomes impossible

There is a mathematical reason why machine learning systems like GPT-3 are incapable of understanding. The reason comes down to the fact that machine learning has no memory. It is just probabilistic associations. If there is only a 10% chance of going off topic, then after just seven exchanges there is a greater than 50% chance the machine learning model has gone off topic. The problem is that when prediction is just based on probabilities, the likelihood of making a misprediction increases exponentially. A long-term memory is needed in order to maintain long-term coherence. GPT-3 is essentially a sophisticated Markov process. What is important about the Markov process is that the next step in the process is only dependent on Read More ›