Thread: ChatGPT is going to take over the world

But it doesn't have your touch, feel . . . still makes me feel a bit uneasy, especially if I look at it from a tertiary educational point of view.

Can't green you now PH, but I absolutely agree. I strongly suspect that a large percentage of all commercial writing will be done by AI within the next 5 years. Not only will this wipe out many jobs, but the potential for the spread of non-factual facts is huge!

^ it will be less than that

Agreed

I think the testbot is called Slackbin nd has been stirring the pot here as test drive for Thighland Chunter

Originally Posted by Topper

I prefer Bard

At least they're honest.

Bard is an experiment and may give inaccurate or inappropriate responses.

When ChatGPT came out last November, Olivia Lipkin, a 25-year-old copywriter in San Francisco, didn’t think too much about it. Then, articles about how to use the chatbot on the job began appearing on internal Slack groups at the tech start-up where she worked as the company’s only writer.

Over the next few months, Lipkin’s assignments dwindled. Managers began referring to her as “Olivia/ChatGPT” on Slack. In April, she was let go without explanation, but when she found managers writing about how using ChatGPT was cheaper than paying a writer, the reason for her layoff seemed clear.

“Whenever people brought up ChatGPT, I felt insecure and anxious that it would replace me,” she said. “Now I actually had proof that it was true, that those anxieties were warranted and now I was actually out of a job because of AI.”

Some economists predict artificial intelligence technology like ChatGPT could replace hundreds of millions of jobs, in a cataclysmic reorganization of the workforce mirroring the industrial revolution.

For some workers, this impact is already here. Those that write marketing and social media content are in the first wave of people being replaced with tools like chatbots, which are seemingly able to produce plausible alternatives to their work.

Experts say that even advanced AI doesn’t match the writing skills of a human: It lacks personal voice and style, and it often churns out wrong, nonsensical or biased answers. But for many companies, the cost-cutting is worth a drop in quality.

“We’re really in a crisis point,” said Sarah T. Roberts, an associate professor at University of California in Los Angeles specializing in digital labor. “[AI] is coming for the jobs that were supposed to be automation-proof.”

Artificial intelligence has rapidly increased in quality over the past year, giving rise to chatbots that can hold fluid conversations, write songs and produce computer code. In a rush to mainstream the technology, Silicon Valley companies are pushing these products to millions of users and — for now — often offering them free.

AI and algorithms have been a part of the working world for decades. For years, consumer-product companies, grocery stores and warehouse logistics firms have used predictive algorithms and robots with AI-fueled vision systems to help make business decisions, automate some rote tasks and manage inventory. Industrial plants and factories have been dominated by robots for much of the 20th century, and countless office tasks have been replaced by software.

But the recent wave of generative artificial intelligence — which uses complex algorithms trained on billions of words and images from the open internet to produce text, images and audio — has the potential for a new stage of disruption. The technology’s ability to churn out human-sounding prose puts highly paid knowledge workers in the crosshairs for replacement, experts said.

“In every previous automation threat, the automation was about automating the hard, dirty, repetitive jobs,” said Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. “This time, the automation threat is aimed squarely at the highest-earning, most creative jobs that … require the most educational background.”

In March, Goldman Sachs predicted that 18 percent of work worldwide could be automated by AI, with white-collar workers such as lawyers at more risk than those in trades such as construction or maintenance. “Occupations for which a significant share of workers’ time is spent outdoors or performing physical labor cannot be automated by AI,” the report said.

The White House also sounded the alarm, saying in a December report that “AI has the potential to automate ‘nonroutine’ tasks, exposing large new swaths of the workforce to potential disruption.”

ChatGPT "hallucinates." Some researchers worry it isn’t fixable.

But Mollick said it’s too early to gauge how disruptive AI will be to the workforce. He noted that jobs such as copywriting, document translation and transcription, and paralegal work are particularly at risk, since they have tasks that are easily done by chatbots. High-level legal analysis, creative writing or art may not be as easily replaceable, he said, because humans still outperform AI in those areas.

“Think of AI as generally acting as a high-end intern,” he said. “Jobs that are mostly designed as entry-level jobs to break you into a field where you do something kind of useful, but it’s also sort of a steppingstone to the next level — those are thekinds of jobs under threat.”

Eric Fein ran his content-writing business for 10 years, charging $60 an hour to write everything from 150-word descriptions of bath mats to website copy for cannabis companies. The 34-year-old from Bloomingdale, Ill., built a steady business with 10 ongoing contracts, which made up half of his annual income and provided a comfortable life for his wife and 2-year-old son.

But in March, Fein received a note from his largest client: His services would no longer be needed because the company would be transitioning to ChatGPT. One by one, Fein’s nine other contracts were canceled for the same reason. His entire copywriting business was gone nearly overnight.

“It wiped me out,” Fein said. He urged his clients to reconsider, warning that ChatGPT couldn’t write content with his level of creativity, technical precision and originality. He said his clients understood that, but they told him it was far cheaper to use ChatGPT than to pay him his hourly wage.

Fein was rehired by one of his clients, who wasn’t pleased with ChatGPT’s work. But it isn’t enough to sustain him and his family, who have a little over six months of financial runway before they run out of money.

Now, Fein has decided to pursue a job that AI can’t do, and he has enrolled in courses to become an HVAC technician. Next year, he plans to train to become a plumber.

“A trade is more future-proof,” he said.

The debate over whether AI will destroy us is dividing Silicon Valley

Companies that replaced workers with chatbots have faced high-profile stumbles. When the technology news site CNET used artificial intelligence to write articles, the results were riddled with errors and resulted in lengthy corrections. A lawyer who relied on ChatGPT for a legal brief cited numerous fictitious cases. And the National Eating Disorders Association, which laid off people staffing its helpline and reportedly replaced them with a chatbot, suspended its use of the technology after it doled out insensitive and harmful advice.

Roberts said that chatbots can produce costly errors and that companies rushing to incorporate ChatGPT into operations are “jumping the gun.” Since they work by predicting the most statistically likely word in a sentence, they churn out average content by design. That provides companies with a tough decision, she said: quality vs. cost.

“We have to ask: Is a facsimile good enough? Is imitation good enough? Is that all we care about?” she said. “We’re going to lower the measure of quality, and to what end? So the company owners and shareholders can take a bigger piece of the pie?”

Lipkin, the copywriter who discovered she’d been replaced by ChatGPT, is reconsidering office work altogether. She initially got into content marketing so that she could support herself while she pursued her own creative writing. But she found the job burned her out and made it hard to write for herself. Now, she’s starting a job as a dog walker.

“I’m totally taking a break from the office world,” Lipkin said. “People are looking for the cheapest solution, and that’s not a person — that’s a robot.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/techn...i-taking-jobs/

20 Years ago I knew a couple of lawyers who had given up lawyering and had opened up a small HVAC company. They earned about the same income with fewer working and almost 100% less stress.

A Sky reporter 'built' an AI Sky reporter.

Would be funny if they fired him and gave it his job.



Can AI do my job? We made our own reporter to find out | Science & Tech News | Sky News

The owner of Facebook has announced plans to make its version of the artificial intelligence technology behind ChatGPT free for researchers and companies to use.

The latest version of Meta's large language model, called LLaMa 2, will rival OpenAI's GPT-4, which powers the chatbot app.

The technology came to the fore last November after the release of ChatGPT built a user base of 100 million in just two months.

Meta said in a news release that it decided to open up access to LLaMa 2 so businesses and researchers could access more AI tools and use them to experiment.

LLaMa 2 is the second generation of Meta's large language model, which was first announced in February.

The second version of the model is trained on 40% more data compared with LLaMa 1, according to Meta.

Artificial intelligence has been around for decades and is used in satellite navigation systems and virtual assistants like Siri, but large language models have ushered in a new era of generative AI.

AI: Facebook owner Meta announces its rival to ChatGPT will be free to use | Science & Tech News | Sky News

Europcar denies data breach affecting 50 million customers — says ChatGPT is to blame in creating fake data

Europcar has said that a data breach affecting millions of its customers is fake.

A threat actor was discovered selling a database on a well-known underground forum which they claimed holds the records of close to 50 million customers of the car rental firm. The sample they shared shows apparent names, addresses, license numbers, and bank details among the information.

However, after BleepingComputer contacted Europcar, the firm claimed the breach is not real, adding the data was likely spoofed using AI tools such as ChatGPT.

Europcar says it arrived at this suspicion as the, "addresses don't exist, ZIP codes don't match, first name and last name don't match email addresses, email addresses use very unusual TLDs."

What's more, the company also stated that "none of these email addresses are present in our database."

There are mismatches between usernames and emails, and some addresses have been made up, such as "Lake Alyssaberg, DC" and "West Paulburgh, PA." Also, addresses and phone numbers pertain to regions in the US, while many of the corresponding email addresses are foreign.

HaveIBeenPwned creator Troy Hunt chimed in on X, tweeting that while he believes the data is fake, it isn't necessarily AI-generated, pointing out that some of the email addresses contained in the dataset are real - they've just appeared in previous, unrelated data breaches monitored by the site.

He also said that "we've had fabricated breaches since forever," not just since the AI boom we're experiencing right now. There are also various services that can easily create fake datasets that look convincing on the surface, for the purposes of creating XML documents and anonymizing data, among others.

https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/europcar-denies-data-breach-affecting-50-million-customers-says-chatgpt-is-to-blame-in-creating-fake-data