The fake news thing is a real problem (and may become worse under GPT3 but certainly exists already). As for the others - to quote Westworld, "if you can't tell the difference, does it really matter?"
Most human communications between humans have some physical world purpose, and so an algorithm which is trained to create the impression that a purpose has been fulfilled whilst not actually having any capabilities beyond text generation is going to have negative effects except where the sole purpose of interacting is receiving satisfactory text.
Reviews that look just like real reviews but are actually a weighted average of comments on a different product are negative. Customer service bots that go beyond FAQ to do a very convincing impression of a human service rep promising an investigation into an incident but can't actually start an investigation into the incident are negative. An information retrieval tool which has no information on a subject but can spin a very plausible explanation based on data on a different subject is negative.
Of course, it's entirely possible for humans to bullshit, but unlike text generation algorithms it isn't our default response to everything.
> "if you can't tell the difference, does it really matter?"
It indeed does. The problem is that societies and cultures are heavily influenced and changed by communication, media, and art.
By replacing big portions of these components with artificial content, generated from previously created content, you run the risk of creating feedback cycles (e.g. train future systems from output of their predecessors) and forming standards (beauty, aesthetics, morality, etc.) controlled by the entities that build, train, and filter the output of the AIs.
You'll basically run the risk of killing individuality and diversity in culture and expression; consequences on society as a whole and individual behaviour are difficult to predict, but seeing how much power social media (an unprecedented phenomenon in human culture) have, there's reason to at the very least be cautious about this.
This problem affects all types of agents - natural or artificial. Agent acts in the environment, this causes experience and learning, and thus conditioning the future. The agent has no idea what other opportunities are lost behind past choices.
What scares me personally is the idea that I might be floating in a sea of uncanny valley content. Content that's 98% human-like, but then that 2% sticks out like a nail and snaps me out of it.
Sure, I might not be able to tell the difference the majority of the time, but when I can tell the difference it's gonna bother me a lot.
If you ask GPT-3 for three Lord of the Rings quotes it might give you two real ones and one fake one, because it doesn’t know what truth is and just wants to give you something plausible.
There are creative applications for bullshit, but something that cites its sources (so you can check) and doesn’t hallucinate things would be much more useful. Like a search engine.
Genuine question, why is this a problem? Sure, someone may be able to generate thousands of real-sounding fake news articles, but it's not like they will also be able to flood the New York Times with these articles. How do you worry you will be exposed to these articles?
If recent times have told us anything, it's that the biggest distributor of "news" is social media. And worse still, people generally have no interest in researching the items they read. If "fake news" confirms their pre-existing bias then they will automatically believe it. If real news disagrees with their biases then it is considered fake.
So in theory, the rise of deep fakes could lead to more people getting suckered into conspiracy theories and other such extreme opinions. We've already seen a small trend this way with low resolution images of different people with vaguely similar physical features because used as "evidence" of actors in hospitals / shootings / terrorist scenes / etc.
That all said, I don't see this as a reason not to pursue GPT-3. From that regard the proverbial genie is already out of the bottle. What we need to work on is a better framework for distributing knowledge.
It's not me I'm worried about - it's the 50% [1] of people who get their news from social media and "entertainment" news platforms. These people vote, and can get manipulated into performing quite extreme acts.
At the moment a lot of people seem to have trouble engaging with reality, and that seems to be caused by relatively small disinformation campaigns and viral rumours. How much worse could it get when there's a vast number of realistic-sounding news articles appearing, accompanied by realistic AI-generated photos and videos?
And that might not even be the biggest problem. If these things can be generated automatically and easily, it's going to be very easy to dismiss real information as fake. The labelling of real news as "fake news" phenomenon is going to get bigger.
It's going to be more work to distinguish what is real from what is fake. If it's possible to find articles supporting any position and a suspicion that any contrary new is then a lot of people are going to find it easier to just believe what they prefer to believe... even more than they do now.
The majority of "fake news" are factual news described from a partial point of view and with a political spin.
Even fact checkers are not immune to this and brand other news as true or false not based on facts but based on the political spin they favour.
Fake news is a vastly overstated problem.
Thanks to internet, we now have a wider breadth of political news and opinions and it's easy to label everything-but-your-side as fake news.
There are a few patently false lies on the internet which are taken as examples of fake news - but they have very few supporters.
> Even fact checkers are not immune to this and brand other news as true or false not based on facts but based on the political spin they favour.
Could you give an example?
> There are a few patently false lies on the internet which are taken as examples of fake news - but they have very few supporters.
How many do you consider "few"?
I can go to my local news site and read a story about the novel coronavirus and the majority of comments below the article are stating objectively false facts.
"It's just a flu"
"Hospitals are empty"
"The survival rate is 99.9%"
"Vaccines alter your DNA"
...and so on.
There is the conspiracy theory or cult called QAnon, which "includes in its belief system that President Trump is waging a secret war against elite Satan-worshipping paedophiles in government, business and the media."
One QAnon Gab group has more than 165,000 users. I don't think these are small numbers.
Pew Research says 18% report getting news primarily from social media (fielded 10/19-6/20)[0]. November 2019 research said 41% among 18-29 year olds, which was the peak age group. Older folks largely watch news on TV[1].
I don't think so - I was aware that it was a made-up number, and highlighted the fact that it was. It's the lack of awareness of what is backed up by data that is the problem I think.
Right, it's definitely goof that you cited it being fake, but I think the parent was pointing out the subtle (and likely unintentional) irony of discussing fake news while providing _fake_ numbers to support your opinion.
