Chat GPT announced itself in my world in December 2022, Twitter (as it was then) was full of people posting song lyrics about recent news in the style of recognisable songwriters like Nick Cave or Taylor Swift. I had a play and wasn’t that impressed then in 2023 all the self employed gurus were singing from the rooftops about how AI was going to change everything. I looked closer and listened to what was being said. A lot of these gurus were way off base, misleading people about how ChatGPT worked and what it was capable of doing (spoiler alert, it wasn’t actually generating brand new, never before seen text). I’ll first explain a bit about what Chat GPT is and then I’ll dig into some of the reasons I don’t want to use it.
GPT stands for *** it’s a large scale language processing programme. Which means it has spent years scraping all the text it can find and learning the patterns. It has learned that if a sentence starts “the cat sits on the” then the next word is usually “mat”. When it creates a text, it doesn’t understand the words it produces, it’s just calculated the most probable word that go next to each other.
The first issue is that it’s not solely a computer programme. Somewhere in West Africa or East Asia, low paid workers are having to correct the programme to help it learn. The wages are exploitative and the work is tedious. The work happens in poorer countries so work is relatively cheap but also the works lack union protections
Open AI is an odd organisation. It was originally set up so that Chat GPT would remain free / open source but there has been some strange goings on with the board in recent months.
Aside from the human resource, the natural resources used by Chat GPT are also jaw dropping. Each conversation with Chat GPT requires on average 500ml of water to cool the data centre. The daily power use of Chat GPT is equivalent to 180,000 US households. Currently, data centres represent 1% of a countries power usage and that number is only set to rise.
Every time you ask Chat GPT a question and then offer feedback on the response, you are helping train the model. At one time, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter were all free to use, then when it became obvious how people were using the platform, the tech companies were able to monitise the platforms. Even if they introduce a paid tier and you never use Chat GPT again, you have helped develop their product for no reward. Additionally, whatever information you have fed into the LLM now belongs in there whether that is a copyrighted novel or private patient data.
Programmers have built in controls to stop the results of queries being used to cause harm to the user or other people. However, researchers have found ways around the safety mechanisms. Hopefully, Chat GPT and other LLMs will move quickly to patch a fix but will it be a game of “whack-a-mole” trying to stop work arounds
The LLM depends on having a huge database of language to learn from. Chat GPT has been scrapping the internet. The vast majority of people have not consented to their work being absorbed in this way and many artists (such as writers, photographers, visual artists, musicians) are attempt to wrangle back some control of their work but is the genie out of the bottle? When Chat GPT spits out text that makes sense, it’s based on what likely comes next. It doesn’t necessarily think of correct attribution. It know that the phrase “the master’s tools will” usually ends “never dismantle the master’s house” but, whilst the words Audre Lord are also often nearby in the text, it can not be depended on to inform a use that these words belong in quotation marks.
Finally, if asked directly, this isn’t the future that most of us want. The majority of people would like the computers to do the back breaking, soul crushing work whilst humans get on with living in secure houses, with sufficient healthcare, heating and food and clean water, being in community, creating art and thinking profound thoughts. Why have the tech bros decided that people should toil in warehouse conditions so that the computers can create poems about Brexit in the style of Nick Cave or photos of the Pope in a puffa jacket?
