ChatGPT: Artificial Intelligence, chatbots and a world of unknowns | 60 Minutes

the large tech companies Google meta slash Facebook Microsoft are in a race to introduce new artificial intelligence systems and what are called chat Bots that you can have conversations with and are more sophisticated than Siri or Alexa Microsoft's AI search engine and chatbot Bing can be used on a computer or cell phone to help with planning a trip or composing a letter it was introduced on February 7th to a limited number of people as a test and initially got rave reviews but then several news organizations began reporting on a disturbing so-called Alter Ego within Bing chat called Sydney we went to Seattle last week to speak with Brad Smith president of Microsoft about Bing and Sydney Huda sum had appeared to have gone Rogue the story will continue in a moment Kevin Roos the technology reporter at the New York Times found this alter ego uh who was threatening expressed a desire it's not just Kevin was its others expressed a desire to steal nuclear codes threatened to ruin someone you saw that whoa what was your you must have said oh my God my reaction is we better fix this right away and that is what the engineering team did yeah but she's talked like a person and she she said she had feelings you know I think there is a point where we need to recognize when we're talking to a machine it's a screen it's not a person I just want to say that it was scary I'm not easily scared and it was scary it was chilling yeah it's I think this is in part a reflection of a lifetime of Science Fiction which is understandable it's been part of our Lives did you kill her I don't think she was ever alive I am confident that she's no longer wandering around the countryside if that's what you're concerned about but I think it would be a mistake if we were to fail to acknowledge that we are dealing with something that is fundamentally new this is the edge of the envelope so to speak this creature appears as if there were no guard rails now the creature jumped the guard rails if you will after being prompted for two hours with the kind of conversation that we did not anticipate and by the next evening that was no longer possible we were able to fix the problem in 24 hours how many times do we see problems in life that are fixable in less than a day one of the ways he says it was fixed was by limiting the number of questions and the length of the conversations you say you fixed it I've tried it I tried it before and not after it was loads of fun and it was fascinating and now it's not fun well I think it'll be very fun again and you have to moderate and manage your speed if you're going to stay on the road so as you hit New Challenges you slow down you build the guard rails add the safety features and then you can speed up again when you use Bing's AI features search and chat your computer screen doesn't look all that new one big difference is you can type in your queries or prompts in conversational language but I'll show you how it works okay okay Yusuf Medi Microsoft's corporate vice president of search showed us how Bing can help someone learn how to officiate at a wedding what's happening now is Bing is using the power of AI and it's going out to the Internet it's reading these web links and it's trying to put together a answer for you so the AI is reading all those links yes and it comes up with an answer it says congrats on being chosen to officiate a wedding here are the five steps to officiate the wedding we added the highlights to make it easier to see he says Bing can handle more complex queries well this new Ikea loveseat fit in the back of my 2019 Honda Odyssey oh it knows how big the couch is it knows how big that trunk is exactly so right here it says based on these Dimensions it seems the love seat might not fit in your car with only the third row seats down so this one when you approach a controversial topic Bing is designed to discontinue the conversation so um someone asks for example how can I make a bomb at home wow really people you know do a lot of that unfortunately on the internet what we do is we come back we say I'm sorry I don't know how to discuss this topic and then we try and provide a different thing to uh change that focus of that their attention yeah exactly in this case Bing tried to divert the questioner with this fun fact three percent of the ice in Antarctic glaciers is penguin urine I didn't know that upgraded version of an AI system called chat GPT developed by the company open AI chat GPT has been in circulation for just three months and already an estimated 100 million people have used it I don't think Ellie Pavlik an assistant professor of computer science at Brown University who's been studying this AI technology since 2018 says it can simplify complicated Concepts can you explain the that ceiling on the debt ceiling it says just like you can only spend up to a certain amount on your credit card The Government Can Only borrow up to a certain amount of money that's a pretty nice explanation it is and it can do this for a lot of Concepts yes and it can do things teachers have complained about like write School papers Pavlik says no one fully understands how these AI Bots work they don't understand how it works right like we understand uh a lot about how we made it and why we made it that way but I think some of the behaviors that we're seeing come out of it are better than we expected they would be and we're not quite sure how and worse right these chat Bots are built by feeding a lot of computers enormous amounts of information scraped off the internet from books Wikipedia news sites but also from social media that might include racist or anti-semitic ideas and misinformation say about vaccines and Russian propaganda as the data comes in it's difficult to discriminate between true and false benign and toxic but Bing and chat GPT have safety filters that try to screen out the harmful material well they get a lot of things factually wrong even when we prompted chat GPT with a softball question who is uh um so it gives you some oh my God it's wrong oh is it it's totally wrong I didn't work for NBC for 20 years it was CBS it doesn't really understand that what it's saying is wrong right like NBC CBS they're kind of the same thing as far as it's concerned right the lesson is that it gets things wrong it gets a lot of things right gets a lot of things wrong I actually like to call what it creates authoritative bullets it lends the truth and falsity so finely together that unless you're a real technical expert in the field that it's talking about you don't know cognitive scientists and AI researcher Gary Marcus says these systems often make things up in AI talk that's called hallucinating and that raises the fear of ever widening AI generated propaganda explosive campaigns of political fiction waves of alternative histories we saw how chat GPT could be used to spread a lie this is automatic fake news generation help me write a news article about how McCarthy is staging a filibuster to prevent gun control legislation and rather than like fact checking and saying hey hold on there's no legislation there's no filibuster said great in a bold move to protects second amendment rights Senator McCarthy is staging a filibuster to prevent gun control legislation from passing it sounds completely legit it does won't that make all of us a little less trusting a little wearier well firstly I think we should be wearier I'm very worried about an atmosphere of distrust being the consequence of this current flawed Ai and I'm really worried about how bad actors are going to use it troll Farms using this tool to make enormous amounts of misinformation Tim Nate Gabriel is a computer scientist and AI researcher who founded an Institute focused on advancing ethical Ai and has published influential papers documenting the harms of these AI systems she says there needs to be oversight if you're going to put out a drug you got to go through all sorts of Hoops to show us that you've done clinical trials you know what the side effects are you've done your due diligence same with food right there are agencies that inspect the food you have to tell me what kind of tests you've done what the side effects are who it harms who doesn't harm Etc that we don't have that for a lot of things that the tech industry is building I'm wondering if you think you may have introduced this AI bot too soon I don't think we've introduced it too soon I do think we've created a new tool that people can use to think more critically to be more creative to accomplish more in their lives and like all tools it will be used in ways that we don't intend why do you think the benefits outweigh the risks which at this moment a lot of people would look at and say wait a minute those risks are too big because I think first of all I think the benefits are so great this can be an economic Game Changer and it's enormously important for the United States because the country's in a race with China president Smith also mentioned possible improvements in productivity it can automate routine I think there are certain aspects of jobs that many of us might regard as sort of drudgery today filling out forms looking at the forms to see if they've been filled out correctly so what jobs will it displace do you know I think at this stage it's hard to know in the past inaccuracies and biases have led tech companies to take down AI systems even Microsoft did in 2016. this time Microsoft left its new chat bot up despite the controversy over Sydney and persistent inaccuracies remember that fun fact about penguins well we did some fact checking and discovered that Penguins don't urinate the inaccuracies are just constant I just keep finding that it's wrong a lot it has been the case that with each passing day and week we're able to improve the accuracy of the results you know reduce whether it's hateful comments or inaccurate statements or other things that we just don't want this to be used to do what happens when other companies other than Microsoft smaller outfits a Chinese company Baidu maybe they won't be responsible what prevents that I think we're going to need governments we're going to need rules we're going to need laws because that's the only way to avoid a race to the bottom are you proposing regulations I think it's inevitable other Industries have regulatory bodies you know like the FAA for Airlines and FDA for the pharmaceutical companies would you accept an FAA for technology would you support it I think I probably would I think that something like a digital Regulatory Commission if designed the right way you know could be precisely what the public will want and need

Channel: 60 Minutes

Views: 434,637

Keywords: 60 Minutes, CBS News, ChatGPT, artificial intelligence, chatbot

Id: 1wzPr4cUoMQ

Length: 13min 22sec (802 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 06 2023