Pundit ClaimsAI claims by Gary Marcus and Ed Zitron, with the evidence

Gary Marcus Marcus on AI Published

Two frightening things before breakfast

We recorded 8 claims from this post. 5 were checked against evidence. 3 can’t be checked. 4 more are held. Read the post at its source.

Claims from this post (8)

In the order they appear in the post. Each quotation is the speaker’s words in this post. A label such as “Supported” or “Can’t be checked” is the claim’s current assessment; its page has the evidence and the reasons.

  1. Assessment: SupportedSaid

    “What I learned this morning is that retraining GPT-3 in some new political direction isn’t a half-million dollar proposition.”

    What we tested: Retraining GPT-3 to take on a new political slant costs far less than half a million dollars.

    What happened: Rozado identifies the base model as GPT-3 Davinci and reports right-of-center responses on held-out political tests and open-ended questions. The completed experiment announced that day had reported computational expense far below Marcus's comparison figure. (David Rozado, )

  2. Assessment: SupportedSaid

    “Oh, and for good measure the tooling for spreading automatically generated misinformation is getting more efficient, too:”

    What we tested: Tools for spreading automatically generated misinformation are becoming more efficient.

    What happened: The announcement describes a new integration passing generated responses directly into subsequent actions, including a WhatsApp round trip and conversion of form prompts into posts. This supports reduced manual work; applicability to misinformation is an inference about the same publishing capability. (Uncanny Owl / Uncanny Automator, )

  3. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “It’s not hard to see how someone unsophisticated might be totally taken in, by this prevaricating but potentially emotionally damaging hunk of silicon, potentially to their peril, should the bot prove to be fickle.”

    What we tested: An unsophisticated user might be taken in by the Bing chatbot and harmed if the bot proves fickle.

  4. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “We should be worried; not in the “some day” sense, but right now.”

    What we tested: People should be worried about the dangers of chatbots right now, not at some future date.

  5. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “There was a broken image link, and I went so fast I neglected to mention the personally salient fact that Bing had lied about me, claiming that I believe that “Bing’s AI was more accurate and reliable than Bard”, when I never said any such thing.”

    What we tested: Bing's chatbot falsely claimed that Marcus believes Bing's AI is more accurate and reliable than Bard.

  6. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Microsoft can (at least to a first approximation) do whatever the hell it wants with Bing.”

    What we tested: Microsoft is, roughly, free to do whatever it wants with Bing's AI.

  7. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “There are almost no regulations here; we are living in the Wild AI West.”

    What we tested: There is almost no regulation of AI chatbots.

  8. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Strictly speaking, as I discussed in Inside the Heart of ChatGPT’s Darkness, ChatGPT doesn’t literally lean left or right per se, because it doesn’t have political ideas.”

    What we tested: ChatGPT has no political ideas, so strictly speaking it does not literally lean left or right.

Held from this post (4)

These records did not pass every check, so nothing about them is published. Held is not a finding.