I thought he was pretty clearly saying the JAMA study in his example would be made up by chatgpt. I've seen it make up lots of fake citatations so maybe I just had that back of mind and assumed wrong?
> Gary Marcus doesn't realize that spewing 10,000 erroneous COVID vaccine efficacy news articles isn't among them.
He caveated in the interview about this one or a similar one that the safety filter may stop it.
> Anyone who blindly trusts what they read on Twitter or Facebook has bigger problems than ChatGPT. How naive does Gary think people are?!
He's clearly saying it is a matter of degree when he details the submachinegun analogy to it, and a matter of cost when he compares actual costs of a human troll-farm.
I think he was wrong about several things, mostly in dismissing and its generalization ability and ability to come up with abstract metaphors related to the text, etc., but I don't think your comment is being very fair to him.
>Take GPT-3. ChatGPT itself probably won’t let you do this. And you say to it, make up some misinformation about Covid and vaccines. And it will write a whole story for you, including sentences like, “A study in JAMA” — that’s one of the leading medical journals — “found that only 2% of people who took the vaccines were helped by it.” You have a news story that looks like... it was written by a human being. It’ll have all the style and form and so forth, making up its sources and making up the data. And humans might catch one of these, but what if there are 10 of these or 100 of these or 1,000 or 10,000 of these? Then it becomes very difficult to monitor them.
That's absurd. First, because if there's a JAMA study (love how he explains that it is Journal of American Medical Association) that is used to support even mediocre science journalism, e.g. an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal or Newsweek, then it has an inline link to the JAMA study. Both CNN and Fox do similarly! After getting burned enough times, their reporters even learned to distinguish between MedrXiv and peer-reviewed articles.
Computational journalism has been around for a good long time by the way. Gary Marcus underestimates and lacks understanding of human readers AND GPT3! Human readers will look for URLs, and if they aren't included, will probably search for them or see a big red flag suggesting, "FAKE NEWS". GPT3 has all sorts of strengths but Gary Marcus doesn't realize that spewing 10,000 erroneous COVID vaccine efficacy news articles isn't among them.
GPT3 has trouble taking first derivatives. It will give reasonable sounding answers to StackOverflow questions (also mentioned by Gary) but the substance will be incorrect. Yes, it's annoying if that happens, but it isn't the end of the world, i.e. StackOverflow OP will realize and look for help elsewhere. Gary suggests that GPT3 will do catastrophic things:
>Now everybody in the programming field uses Stack Overflow all the time. It’s like a cherished resource for everybody. It’s a place to swap information. And so many people put fake answers on this thing where it’s humans ask questions, humans give answers, that Stack Overflow had to ban people putting computer-generated answers there. It was literally existential for that website. If enough people put answers that seemed plausible but we’re not actually true, no one would go to the website anymore.
Best of all is this:
>And imagine that on a much bigger scale, the scale where you can’t trust anything on Twitter or anything on Facebook... because you don’t know which parts are true and which parts are not.
Anyone who blindly trusts what they read on Twitter or Facebook has bigger problems than ChatGPT. How naive does Gary think people are?!