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.
Full opinion : One Year In and ChatGPT Already Has Us Doing Its Bidding.
