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The emergence of ChatGPT and now GPT-4, the artificial intelligence interface from OpenAI that will chat with you, answer questions and passably write a high school term paper, is both a quirky diversion and a harbinger of how technology is changing the way we live in the world.
After reading a report in The New York Times by a writer who said a Microsoft chatbot professed its love for him and suggested he leave his wife, I wanted to learn more about how AI works and what, if anything is being done to give it a moral compass.
I talked to Reid Blackman, who has advised companies and governments on digital ethics and wrote the book “Ethical Machines.” Our conversation focuses on the flaws in AI but also recognizes how it will change people’s lives in remarkable ways. Excerpts are below.
WOLF: What is the definition of artificial intelligence, and how do we interact with it every day?
BLACKMAN: It’s super simple. … It’s called a fancy word: machine learning. All it means is software that learns by example.
Everyone knows what software is; we use it all the time. Any website you go on, you’re interacting with the software. We all know what it is to learn by example, right?
We do interact with it every day. One common way is in your photos app. It can recognize when it’s a picture of you or your dog or your daughter or your son or your spouse, whatever. And that’s because you’ve given it a bunch of examples of what those people or that animal looks like.
So it learns, oh that’s Pepe the dog, by giving it all these examples, that is to say photos. And then when you upload or take a new picture of your dog, it “recognizes” that that’s Pepe. It puts it in the Pepe folder…
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