The Guardian is concerned about Truth In Journalism.
From the Guardian, March 3:
A platform that can mimic humans’ writing with no commitment to the truth is a gift for those who benefit from disinformation. We need to regulate its use now
It has taken a very short time for artificial intelligence application ChatGPT to have a disruptive effect on journalism. A technology columnist for the New York Times wrote that a chatbot expressed feelings (which is impossible). Other media outlets filled with examples of “Sydney” the Microsoft-owned Bing AI search experiment being “rude” and “bullying” (also impossible). Ben Thompson, who writes the Stratechery newsletter, declared that Sydney had provided him with the “most mind-blowing computer experience of my life” and he deduced that the AI was trained to elicit emotional reactions – and it seemed to have succeeded.
To be clear, it is not possible for AI such as ChatGPT and Sydney to have emotions. Nor can they tell whether they are making sense or not. What these systems are incredibly good at is emulating human prose, and predicting the “correct” words to string together. These “large language models” of AI applications, such as ChatGPT, can do this because they have been fed billions of articles and datasets published on the internet. They can then generate answers to questions.
For the purposes of journalism, they can create vast amounts of material – words, pictures, sounds and videos – very quickly. The problem is, they have absolutely no commitment to the truth. Just think how rapidly a ChatGPT user could flood the internet with fake news stories that appear to have been written by humans.
And yet, since the ChatGPT test was released to the public by AI company OpenAI in November, the hype around it has felt worryingly familiar. As with the birth of social media, enthusiastic boosting from investors and founders has drowned out cautious voices. Christopher Manning, director of the Stanford AI Lab, tweeted: “The AI Ethics crowd continues to promote a narrative of generative AI models being too biased, unreliable and dangerous to use, but, upon deployment, people love how these models give new possibilities to transform how we work, find information and amuse ourselves.” I would consider myself part of this “ethics crowd”. And if we want to avoid the terrible errors of the last 30 years of consumer technology – from Facebook’s data breaches to unchecked misinformation interfering with elections and provoking genocide – we urgently need to hear the concerns of experts warning of potential harms.
The most worrying fact to be reiterated is that ChatGPT has no commitment to the truth. As the MIT Technology Review puts it, large language model chatbots are “notorious bullshitters”. Disinformation, grifting and criminality don’t generally require a commitment to truth either. Visit the forums of blackhatworld.com, where those involved in murky practices trade ideas for making money out of fake content, and ChatGPT is heralded as a gamechanger for generating better fake reviews, or comments, or convincing profiles....
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It was at this point I started laughing.
That line "...has no commitment to the truth." followed by “notorious bullshitters” reminded me of a story in the Guardian in 2018.
They employ someone called Luke Harding who [co-]wrote a story that ran in the paper on Tue 27 Nov 2018 09.23 EST. Going on five years ago:
Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and visited around the time he joined Trump’s campaign, the Guardian has been told.
Sources have said Manafort went to see Assange in 2013, 2015 and in spring 2016 – during the period when he was made a key figure in Trump’s push for the White House.
In a statement, Manafort denied meeting Assange. He said: “I have never met Julian Assange or anyone connected to him. I have never been contacted by anyone connected to WikiLeaks, either directly or indirectly. I have never reached out to Assange or WikiLeaks on any matter.” It is unclear why Manafort would have wanted to see Assange and what was discussed. But the last apparent meeting is likely to come under scrutiny and could interest Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor who is investigating alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia....
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The thing to remember, for our readers who were going on about their lives rather than trying to figure-out a money-making angle in that day's headlines, was that what Harding, his editors and the Guardian claimed was impossible.
At the time the story was published the Ecuadoran Embassy in London was the most surveilled building in the world. The British had it staked out, both MI5 and MI6 were keeping tabs on who was coming and going, the Australians were down the block, the Americans had a plan for a CIA assassination team to supplant the watchers [Yahoo broke that story], Russia was there, I'm guessing Israel and maybe China too. The spooks were tripping over each other there were so many different groups.
And none of them saw what Harding reported.
Julian Assange's three-year stay in Ecuadorean embassy has cost taxpayer £11.1m
Three years ago the WikiLeaks founder fled bail and sought asylum in Ecuador - resulting in millions being spent on policing the embassy
