from Hacker News

ChatGPT Considered Harmful: Our Whole Society Is in Danger

by eloop on 1/16/23, 4:06 AM with 17 comments

• by andrewstuart on 1/16/23, 4:45 AM

  ChatGPT, write a poem about "considered harmful"

  "Considered Harmful"

  A label too often placed,

  On thoughts and ideas unbraced,

  By those who fear the change it brings,

  And cling to what familiarity brings.

  But progress waits for none,

  And stagnation must be undone,

  For growth and evolution's sake,

  We must make the considered harmful, break.

  For every idea met with disdain,

  May hold the key to progress, attain,

  So let us not be quick to judge,

  And keep an open mind, a mind that's not sludge.

  For what is harmful in one's eyes,

  May lead to breakthroughs, skies to skies.

  So let us not be afraid,

  To challenge the status quo, and let the considered harmful fade.

• by smaddox on 1/16/23, 4:54 AM

  I agree that ChatGPT's ability to generate convincing arguments for complete BS is concerning. But I'm not convinced it's a clear negative, in the long run. Humans have been concocting convincing arguments for complete BS for millennia. Perhaps having non-humans generate such arguments will make humans less inclined to believe BS based on such arguments. Eventually AI's will be able to think logically, barring any catastrophes that prevent further improvements. And eventually, the AI alignment problem will either be solved or human civilization will fail in one way or another. In the meantime, things will be very strange, but not clearly better or worse.

• by chris_armstrong on 1/16/23, 4:48 AM

  There's an alarmist aspect to this article, but there is no doubt that things like ChatGPT will be used to produce an enormous amount of garbage texts that will flood into and destroy the value of content-driven sites like news, recipes, social media, how-to/tutorial, education, etc.

  A higher value will be put on socially administered and validated content providers, where reputation will be king.

• by heyitsguay on 1/16/23, 4:51 AM

  I'd like to comment on this, but the author has not explicitly consented to me learning from the text.

• by blondin on 1/16/23, 4:31 AM

  oh wow! ChatGPT is bad because we (humans) can use it to do bad things? is that what the author is trying to say, or did i completely miss the point here?

  and if i didn't... seriously?

• by glitchc on 1/16/23, 4:45 AM

  A bit of an overreaction. In time, ChatGPT will fade into obscurity like every other over-hyped AI offering.

• by narrator on 1/17/23, 8:58 PM

  The AI superpersuaders are coming. There will be a market for AI depersuaders that will argue against the superpersuaders.

• by dangond on 1/16/23, 5:02 AM

  > Even the danger of nuclear energy is less harmful compared to ChatGPT because you still need many experts to build an atomic bomb or a very expensive power plant that potentially turns a large area unusable for thousands of years. It's not that we haven't had multiple incidents proving that point.

  I'm sure the victims of nuclear weapons and accidents would very much like to disagree. Misinformation (which seems to be the most dangerous harm mentioned) is hardly comparable to these things, even taking into account the expertise needed to create a nuclear bomb or power plant.

  Also, the author complains that in the past you could tell what was misinformation by identifying typos. Plenty of misinformation lacked misspellings and grammar mistakes before ChatGPT, and this very article contained a few of its own. If anything, this will stop people from relying on writing style as a way of verifying the validity of a statement (which is silly), and start using critical thinking to do so. In the end, this is the only way to ever find "the truth", especially in areas where you have no prior knowledge as the author worries about. People aren't helpless to good writing.