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Internet of Garbage: Are Chat Bots About to Destroy Online Communications? [1]

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Date: 2023-03-17

OpenAI has introduced the newest version of its chat bot. It is supposed to be able to handle more text and produce better answers in certain specific domains, though it still "hallucinates", the technical term chat bot developers have created for the propensity for chat bots to make shit up. Already companies are using this version of GPT to provide automated answers based on technical documentation. Microsoft is releasing a new version of Clippy (sadly, without the animation) that will use GPT4 to create PowerPoints out of word documents or draft email responses.

And all I can think of is how horrible this is going to be.

Not, let me stress, because of people losing their jobs. Microsoft, for example, stresses that the material created will likely still need to be edited -- that it is a start, not an end. The companies using GPT4 for help systems are using them in places where the help chat is already largely automated -- people have already largely been removed from these realms. While it is possible that some jobs may be lost, I think it's actually likely that this level of "intelligence" for want of a better term might create jobs. If it is easy to get documentation started, you might create more of it then before, but still need people who can properly edit the results, or properly work with the cha bot to massage the inputs so that less editing is needed. Someone who can generate outputs form a chat bot with fewer hallucinations is probably someone worth paying, at least to a business with contractual or reputational concerns.

No, what worries me is the sheer amount of crap I think we are about to be flooded with. The obvious misinformation that these things are going to flood social media with is one concern, yes. But think about how this is going to impact almost everything else. Amazon is already swamped with so-called nonfiction books that are just copies of people's websites or wholesale thefts of Wikipedia articles. How much worse is it going to be when it takes an hour to produce gibberish from a chat bot and throw it up on Kindle Unlimited? Clarksworld has already had to stop taking submission because they were flooded with chat bot generated stories -- as producing those becomes easier and wading through them to find real creativity becomes harder, how much worse is that going to get?

And don't think your work or personal life is going to be immune. How many of those PowerPoint presentations are really going to be needed? How many of the email replies will really have to go out? Today we are already overwhelmed with too much conversation and information, and that is with the limitation of having a human being have to generate most of it. How much worse is your inbox going to be when a push of a button can make anyone look like they are contributing to "work". Or how much more spam will you get? Can dating apps, for example, or online marketplaces, survive the onslaught of chat bots sure to come? The natural response of having a bot to respond to bots will almost certainly make this all worse as these little automated chatter boxes chase each other into literary oblivion, flooding out the rest of us.

I can see a world where certified human produced works, or works certified to be curated by a human being, actually attain a certain credibility and cachet that purely chat bit generated works don't. Where platforms that force you to prove you a person and don't allow bots of any kind have a status that purely open system do not. But that has its own set of problems. Those systems and platforms will obviously cost more, as it will cost to produce and police those systems. We already live in a world where disinformation tends to be free and higher quality journalism tends to live behind paywalls (broadly speaking, of course). Exacerbating that divide does not seem like it leads to a healthy democracy.

Similarly, returning to a world where most people can only trust information from a handful of gatekeepers is also problematic. The internet has many, many, many downsides, but it did allow oppressed, forgotten and unpopular minorities a way to make themselves heard and that has, overall, been a positive for our democracy. Losing that means losing many important voices and a return to many important issues being ignored by our media and thus our country's leaders.

I feel like we are standing on shore right before a wave hits, with no idea how large the wave actually is. It could be a ripple, or it could sweep deep inland, flooding the whole community. The makers of these bots don't care. They will make their money either way, and they live high up in the mountains. the rest of us, though, better be prepared to get wet.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/17/2158599/-Internet-of-Garbage-Are-Chat-Bots-About-to-Destroy-Online-Communications

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