Mailing List Archive

[Wikimedia-l] Re: Bing-ChatGPT
On Mon, Feb 20, 2023 at 12:33 PM Jimmy Wales <jimmywales@wikitribune.com> wrote:
> Speaking only for myself, out of curiosity, some real world examples might be helpful here. I don't have access to Bing's
> version yet, but I do have access to chat.openai.com which is very impressive but deeply flawed.

I've found ChatGPT most useful for small coding tasks (with a lot of
scrutiny). Most of the other practical applications I've heard of have
been of the creative variety, or in writing mundane letters, emails,
proposals, summaries, etc. As an example, please find a
ChatGPT-generated summary of this email at the end.

I think it's best to view ChatGPT (and its like) at this stage at, at
its best, a useful assistive technology and, at its worst, a
distributed denial of service attack on our collective ability to
understand our world.

The attempts to quickly commercially exploit these technologies tend
to push their impact more towards the latter, at least until those
deep flaws you mention are addressed.

It's a technology that requires a high degree of literacy in its
responsible use, while suggesting to the user that it requires none: a
dangerous combination.

The grand vision is to create human-level artificial intelligence.
"AGI" (Artificial General Intelligence) is now an explicit stated goal
of major players in the field. Of course, if AGI is in fact realized,
it _will_ change everything: a dream as big as SETI or limitless
energy generation. But for now we just have sparkling autocomplete.

It's easy to enumerate potential positive applications (assisted
editing, Wikidata query generation via natural language, automatic
summaries of open access citations, ...). For any one of them, I think
the challenge is to figure out a way towards _responsible_
integrations that don't proliferate misinformation and add value.

I do think that it is strategically vital for Wikimedia to understand
and explore this space, to look for low-risk/high-reward applications,
and to be dispassionate and objective in the face of both AI hype and
anti-AI backlash.

Erik

---

ChatGPT summary of this email:

The email discusses the practical applications of ChatGPT and warns
about the negative consequences of quickly commercializing AI
technology. The writer suggests responsible integration of AI to avoid
misinformation and add value, and recommends that Wikimedia explore
low-risk/high-reward AI applications while remaining objective in the
face of AI hype and backlash.
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