Opinion | One Year In and ChatGPT Already Has Us Doing Its Bidding
One of the first things I asked ChatGPT about, early this year, was myself: “What can you tell me about the writer Vauhini Vara?” It told me I’m a journalist (true, though I’m also a fiction writer), that I was born in California (false) and that I’d won a Gerald Loeb Award and a National Magazine Award (false, false).
After that, I got in this habit of inquiring about myself often. Once, it told me Vauhini Vara was the author of a nonfiction book called “Kinsmen and Strangers: Making Peace in the Northern Territory of Australia.” That, too, was false, but I went with it, responding that I had found the reporting to be “fraught and difficult.”
“Thank you for your important work,” ChatGPT said.
Trolling a product hyped as an almost-human conversationalist, tricking it into revealing its essential bleep-bloopiness, I felt like the heroine in some kind of extended girl-versus-robot power game.
Different forms of artificial intelligence have been in use for a long time, but ChatGPT’s unveiling toward the end of last year was what brought A.I., quite suddenly, into our public consciousness. By February, ChatGPT was, by one metric, the fastest-growing consumer application in history. Our first encounters revealed these technologies as extremely eccentric — recall Kevin Roose’s creepy conversation with Microsoft’s A.I.-powered Bing chatbot, which, in the space of two hours, confided that it wanted to be human and was in love with him — and often, as in my experience, extremely wrong.
A lot happened in A.I. since then: Companies went beyond the basic products of the past, introducing more sophisticated tools like personalized chatbots, services that can process photos and sound alongside text and more. The rivalry between OpenAI and more established tech companies became more intense than ever, even as smaller players gained traction. Governments in China, Europe and the United States took major steps toward regulating the technology’s development while trying not to cede competitive ground to other nation’s industries.
But what distinguished the year, more than any single technological, business or political development, was the way A.I. insinuated itself into our daily lives, teaching us to regard its flaws — creepiness, errors and all — as our own while the companies behind it deftly used us to train up their creation. By May, when it came out that lawyers had used a legal brief that ChatGPT had filled with references to court decisions that didn’t exist, the joke, like the $5,000 fine the lawyers were ordered to pay, was on them, not the technology. “It’s embarrassing,” one of them told the judge.
