"I'm sorry sir, but the computer clearly says that you've been charged with sexual harassment - we cannot renew your driver's license and we're putting you on the sexual offenders list, please report to your local PD weekly." (completely made up and exaggerated, but I'm sure one can think of similar scenarios) [1] Good luck convincing the clerk that that's not real. You can probably get it corrected after months of your time and $$.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/04/05/chatgpt...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/nyregion/14watchlist.html
There are 340 million people in the US. The US has one of the largest government systems that humanity is likely to ever see. How many similar cases of children being put on the terrorist watch list have there been in the past 20 years? Unless there are a lot of cases of that happening, if it's not rare (hint: it's extraordinarily rare; your example story is from 13 years ago), your premise is pure straw.
[0]: https://www.wired.com/story/face-recognition-software-led-to... [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/apr/27/california-p...
>(completely made up and exaggerated, but I'm sure one can think of similar scenarios)
How about "I'm sorry sir, but the computer clearly says that you've been at the site of murder and thus killed this guy. Even though all other direct evidence contradicts this, we're gonna have to arrest you. "[1]
The best part of working on projects that used that data set in Google was learning about it from articles like this one.
[1]https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7897319/Police-arre...
We are holding it to a higher standard because this is going to be used by agencies with serious power over people's lives. It is not just to spit out, for example, a form rejection letter from a credit card.
And, nobody thinks that Microsoft wants to "screw" the government. But if something happens, the impact can be magnified significantly considering the reach and power of the state. I'm all for moving forward quickly with this tech, but there are a handful of spaces (government, medicine, aeronautics) where we need to be extremely deliberate.
This behavior is illiberal.
I feel for my kids, and all I can do is warn them...
https://theconversation.com/excel-errors-the-uk-government-h...
The vast majority of government workers are underpaid apathetic cogs in a machine who do not fit this bill.
We just saw a LAWYER use hallucinated information in his practice. A lawyer who is ostensibly rigorously trained and tested in his field.
The amount of misuse of GPT by way of sheer ignorance alone by the government will be astounding.
When talking about the pitfalls of bringing GPT-4 as a tool for government officials, the positive features are outside of the scope.
Obviously they exist, otherwise it wouldn't be proposed. But it's not our job to do a sales pitch for GPT-4.
>Further, the narrative you paint suggests that no one in government is competent in anything and can only follow directions.
No. The OP suggests that the primary users of the tool would be low-level, underpaid officials, who are mostly following directions.
Not because it's their fault as human beings - but because their positions require them to do so, and perhaps for good reasons.
In any case, direction-followers (of questionable competence and low pay grade) make up the bulk of large organizations in general as a consequence of growth. Which is why the tool is being pitched in the first place: to streamline work of people who would rather not do it in the first place.
>Finally, you combine the heavily biased perspectives you took and proposed that it would lead to a massive scandal in the government, b
As if the governments aren't prone to massive scandals even without GPT-4 in place. Try checking the news today, you may be surprised.
>not just any scandal, one that is actually a coordinated attack BY MICROSOFT to screw the government, their largest customer.
"By Microsoft" wasn't in OP's statement. Manipulating data and statistics to get the desired outcome from seemingly impartial algorithms is something our government has been engaging in for a very, very long time.
Redlining[1] and gerrymandering[2] are just two prime examples.
We don't have to make any assumptions or apply biased perspectives to say that we expect:
1)Training data to be manipulated by entities with interest in influencing the outcome;
2)Lives of countless people being adversely affected, and
3)There being a massive scandal as a result.
The government has a long track history of 1, 2, and 3 happening any time a system is introduced which lacks transparency, and large language models are the epitome of that.
The only unrealistic thing about OP's statement is that a scandal will actually happen, instead of people getting away with it.
>It's always interesting to see how people engage with new technologies on HN.
And it is even more interesting to see how people here engage with ethics.
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/realestate/what-is-redlin...
[2]https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/gerr...
But hey, I guess all those dumb dumbs at NASA can’t tie their shoelaces.
I'm from the north-middle, sometimes I'm surprised how little people on the west coast of America think of the people on the east coast.
Above All, The NSA knows their shit. 44B+, Autonomy and Mathematicians Proves it above all, regardless of Morals.
Don't attack them on knowledge. You have to use a different approach to climb Everest.
I would only put the Mossad, KGB and <insert name of the chinese SIGINT agency> on their level.
Further, the narrative you paint suggests that no one in government is competent in anything and can only follow directions.
Finally, you combine the heavily biased perspectives you took and proposed that it would lead to a massive scandal in the government, but not just any scandal, one that is actually a coordinated attack BY MICROSOFT to screw the government, their largest customer.
Just interesting to see.