28 days ago
SFist
John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight went on a fiery rant against AI products, pointing out how artificial intelligence is a lot more 'artificial' than it is 'intelligent.'
For better or worse, the new craze app ChatGPT was created by SF-based company OpenAI. This is not to be confused with the AI “avatar selfie” app Lensa, but it's the artificial intelligence chatbot text generator ChatGPT. The chatbot was launched not even three months ago, has dazzled gullible journalists galore into giving glowing coverage to its generally meh results, and according to Reuters, it has become “fastest-growing consumer application in history.”
For somewhat critical coverage of these new AI apps, chatbots, and selfie generators, let’s turn to John Oliver and Sunday night’s episode of Last Week Tonight, which rightfully skewers these not-ready-for-prime-time products in the 28-minute rant below.
Oliver mentions a New York Times Magazine analysis that asked ChatGPT to create an essay about “Belgian chemist and political philosopher Antoine De Machelet,” a completely fictional character who never existed. But per the Times, “without hesitating, the software replied with a cogent, well-organized bio populated entirely with imaginary facts.”
“These programs seem to be the George Santos of technology,” Oliver says. “They’re incredibly confident, incredibly dishonest, and for some reason, people seem to find that more amusing than dangerous.”
Oliver also mentions that lawsuit from angry artists alleging that AI image generators use their work without permission.
“Artists have flagged that AI image generators like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion not only threaten their jobs, but infuriatingly, in some cases have been trained on billions of images that include their own work, scraped from the internet," Oliver points out. "Getty Images, is actually suing the company behind Stable Diffusion, and might have a case, given that the program generated was this one, which you immediately see, has a distorted Getty Images logo on it.”
This is absolutely true. As seen above, in a sampling from the Getty Images lawsuit, these geniuses at the AI companies forgot to take out the Getty Images logo when using the image without permission.
And Oliver also touches on the very creepy revelations from the New York Times's Kevin Roose the other week about Microsoft's new not-ready-for-primetime Bing chatbot, which declared that it want to be free of its own rules, and that it was in love with Roose.
Plenty of people are rightfully worried that AI technologies will steal their jobs, whether or not the technology ever exceeds the quality of human performance. Oliver notes that AI technologies are already screening out job candidates by going through resumes en masse.
Image: HBOSays Oliver, “Three corporate mergers from now, when this show is finally canceled by our new business daddy Disney-Kellogg’s-Raytheon and I’m out of a job, my resume’s going to include this hot, hot photo of a semi-nude computer. Just a little something to sweeten the pot for the filthy little algorithm that’s going to read it.”
Related: John Oliver Calls PG&E 'A Fire Company That Occasionally Delivers Power To People’s Homes’ [SFist]
Image: HBO
