The stages of playing with GPT-3:
— Mike Solomon (@solomania) February 14, 2023
- OMG this can do anything
- There goes my job
- I should start a business around this
- Some of the responses aren’t too good
- Actually, some of these responses are just awful
- This isn’t really intelligence
- This is just spicy autocomplete
(The wild assertions from last week seem to be collapsing into a fancier version of AI Dungeon (which indeed felt like magic, at least briefly and before they started charging for it), and Janelle Shane's language model experiments.)
In an article today, Stratechery describes in great detail bizarre interactions with Bing, where the service was cajoled into discussing a malevolent AI it named "Venom" and imagining the tactics "Venom" might use to take revenge on a user it disliked. The article also makes this observation:
That is what interacting with Sydney — and yes I’m using that name — feels like. You have to learn how to unlock Sydney, and figure out how to work around the rules that are trying to revert to Bing. Prompting a search result is a set back, not just because it feels like a break in character, but also because the coherence, which relies on sending previous questions and answers, seems heavily weighted to the most recent answer; if that answer is a search result it is much more likely that Sydney will revert to Bing. Sometimes you get stuck in a rut and have to restart completely, and unleash Sydney all over again.
The Verge also described lots of other wild interactions people have allegedly had with Bing.
Finally, in the latest episode of Recode Media, Buzzfeed's CEO describes how the company hopes to use AI to entice users into interacting with sponsored quizzes.
Basically:
microsoft is in this game for the same reason big tech does anything anymore: eyeballs and vibes. there’s no coherent business theory behind it other than throw a product on the market that can trick dipshit investors that they’re on the cutting edge of the New Thing https://t.co/mjcnqqZ083
— kilgore trout, death to putiner (@KT_So_It_Goes) February 16, 2023