This Week in AI Doublespeak

A few more words about bullshit

Wikipedia’s definition of Doublespeak

Has tech become the new politics?

Here’s some first-class AI doublespeak, straight from the Ministry of Damage Control, mostly from just this past week:

CNBC Headline

Except when those wrong answers are not.

Geoff Brumfiel @gbrumfiel

Ok, I mean this is pretty incredible. GPT-4 has invented a news story about Iran concealing a giant nuclear reactor at it's main research site in Arak. It also claims I wrote the story! If Iran DID conceal a reactor, that would be major news and trigger all kinds of alarm.

Very useful. Very cool.

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Pay no attention to the messes we make, says OpenAI¹:

This is an example ofthe tu quoque fallacy, a special form of distraction by ad hominem argument, March 15 at TechCrunch. Would you use a calculator that makes mistakes?

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And by the way, no need to worry, says OpenAI, because our models can reason:

Interview with ABC News, March 16 , mischaracterizing what GPT does

True LLMs don’t (just) memorize, and true that their models make for lousy databases (for a database a hallucination is an outright fail) but if the definition of reasoning is to obtain valid conclusions from known facts, GPT-4 frequently falls short there, too.

Leon Palafox @leonpalafox

This is wrong, very very wrong. The rates impacted the bank, not the startup and there has yet to be a bankruptcy ⁦@GaryMarcus⁩

So-called “reasoning” by free association, even constrained by a giant database, isn’t really reasoning:

François Chollet @fchollet

So far all evidence that LLMs can perform few-shot reasoning on novel problems seems to boil down to "LLMs store patterns they can reapply to new inputs", i.e. it works for problems that follow a structure the model has seen before, but doesn't work on new problems.

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Here’s another form of Orwellian posturing. Microsoft’s website tells you this

“We are committed to making sure AI systems are developed responsibly and in ways that warrant people’s trust.“ (Screenshot from this morning.)

But their actions speak differently.

Microsoft just laid off one of its responsible AI teams

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Once upon a time (February 27, to be specific) OpenAI promised to take good care of us little people:

Nowadays, what we get instead is the old “It’s not our fault; we warned you things might go wrong” excuse:

Fabio Chiusi @fabiochiusi

“I'm particularly worried that these models could be used for large-scale disinformation," said the creator of one of the models that can be used for large-scale disinformation

abcnews.go.comOpenAI CEO Sam Altman says AI will reshape society, acknowledges risks: ‘A little bit scared of this’The CEO behind the company that created ChatGPT believes artificial intelligence will reshape society as we know it, but admits there are extraordinary risks.

Nabil Alouani nails what’s really going on:

Nabil Alouani @Nabil_Alouani_

@GaryMarcus OpenAI: "We're worried about disinformation." Also OpenAI: "We released the perfect tool to generate endless fake news and propaganda. We don't have any significant way to identify AI-generated bullshit. Oh and we won't disclose anything about how our models work. Good luck!"

Note that the same logic applies to essentially every potential harm OpenAI recently warned of. None are solved, and we are told nothing about how the models work.

Some of the many risks of GPT-4, but now in more believable, more persuasive form

Good luck, humans!

Gary Marcus (@garymarcus), scientist, bestselling author, and entrepreneur, is deeply concerned about current AI but genuinely hopeful that we might do better.

Watch for his new podcast, Humans versus Machines, this Spring.

1. The line attributed to Greg Brockman (“it’s not perfect, but neither are you.”) does not appear in the actual news story (aside from the headline), but does appear in the live demo from which the news story was drawn.