ChatGPT’s greatest achievement might just be its ability to trick us into thinking that it’s honest
In American writer Mark Twain's autobiography, he quotes — or perhaps misquotes — former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli as saying: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
In a marvellous leap forward, artificial intelligence combines all three in a tidy little package.
ChatGPT, and other generative AI chatbots like it, are trained on vast datasets from across the internet to produce the statistically most likely response to a prompt. Its answers are not based on any understanding of what makes something funny, meaningful or accurate, but rather, the phrasing, spelling, grammar and even style of other webpages.
It presents its responses through what's called a “conversational interface”: it remembers what a user has said, and can have a conversation using context cues and clever gambits. It's statistical pastiche plus statistical panache, and that's where the trouble lies.
When I talk to another human, it cues a lifetime of my experience in dealing with other people. So when a programme speaks like a person, it is very hard to not react as if one is engaging in an actual conversation — taking something in, thinking about it, responding in the context of both of our ideas.
Yet, that's not at all what is happening with an AI interlocutor. They cannot think and they do not have understanding or comprehension of any sort.
Presenting information to us as a human does, in conversation, makes AI more convincing than it should be. Software is pretending to be more reliable than it is, because it's using human tricks of rhetoric to fake trustworthiness, competence and understanding far beyond its capabilities.
There are two issues here: is the output correct; and do people think that the output is
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