There are lots of articles about bad use cases of ChatGPT that Google already provided for decades.
Want to get bad medical advice for the weird pain in your belly? Google can tell you it’s cancer, no problem.
Do you want to know how to make drugs without a lab? Google even gives you links to stores where you can buy the materials for it.
Want some racism/misogyny/other evil content? Google is your ever helpful friend and garbage dump.
What’s the difference apart from ChatGPT’s inability to link to existing sources?
Edit: Just to clear things up. This post is specifically not about the new use cases that come from AI. Sure, Google cannot make semi-non-functional mini programs automatically, and Google will not write a fake paper in whole for me. I am specifically talking about the “This will change the world” articles, that mirror stuff that Google can do exactly like ChatGPT can.
There’s something that worries me about GPT-like technologies, and I see very few people talking about it: GPT-based social media bots.
It can give people and groups to create much advanced mass manipulation strategies. Imagine a lot of gpt accounts on all sites creating comments advocating pro or against something, every time it’s mentioned, in a very natural language, that can fool most people.
It worries me a lot, and I’m sure it will be done at some point. If recent elections around the world were a mess due to a lot of social media manipulation and fake news campaigns, now imagine that powered by gpt.
I don’t know. Social media bots have been doing exactly that quite well for a long time. Turns out, you don’t actually have to write a comment, you just need to find another one that talks about the same key words and copy it in.
You still get great natural language (since it is natural language) and it fools most people as well.
Political talking points aren’t that varied. There are a handful of different takes on each topic and people repeat them already, so just copying them doesn’t make much of a difference.
I get chatgpt prompts in every search on bing and specifically for a troubleshoot in Linux. It is garbage, and I skip it completely.
It’s only good for stringing together nonsense, say for meeting minutes to pretend the meeting actually did something useful.
That’s the thing: LLMs are great for any content where quality and accuracy doesn’t matter.
- Stock photos
- Product descriptions
- Meeting notes
- Summaries of stuff that’s so boring and useless that you can’t be bothered to read the long form
Then again, if the conteent doesn’t matter, why even create it?
I dunno.
Every history book I’ve ever read seems to indicate that our species tends toward using new technology for the worst purposes.
Sure, but many purposes that people are afraid that ChatGPT could be used for are already 1:1 possible with Google.
Reminds me of the 3D printed gun discussion. Sure, you can use a 3D printer to print a super crappy gun that can’t build up enough pressure for the projectile to gain some actual lethal speed without exploding.
Or you could do what people have been doing for centuries and just get a pipe and some other hardware from the hardware store and build a gun manually. That’s literally how guns where made for centuries. (Except that you have to replace the big box hardware store with the correct equivalent of the time.)
Ebay has rolled out some kind of language model plugin for their listing app. It will generate a short product description for you. I’ve been using chat gpt to do this for awhile and also asking it to optimize titles within the 80 character limit.
I can’t always think of related words that other people might search for so this helps me a lot.
I guess, LLM generated hallucinations can’t be worse than the current atrocities that product pages are.
The only downside of the LLM version is that they tend to be much longer with much more nonsense that you have to parse to get to the real content.
Kinda like Aliexpress product pages. “Superior Ultrafast Powersaving Hightec Most Modern Best Beautiful CPU”.
Hopefully they don’t combine it with an image generator that then also generates nonsense product pictures.
From what I can tell it simply uses your current item title and item specifics that you’ve entered.
I actually have dall-e images for my store categories specifically because they look surreal as hell. It fits with my branding though.
Ebay is better than ali or Amazon with the seo titles because it limits you to 80 characters.
The issue with their descriptions is that they haven’t changed the description area in 20 years and you have sellers embedding a whole website from 1998 in there. That and it’s Impossible to find the product description in the app, most buyers don’t read it.
I have cgpt the prompt “write an seo optimized product description for a pentium D processor”
Introducing the Pentium D Processor: Unleash Powerhouse Performance
Upgrade your computing experience with the Pentium D Processor, a true powerhouse that delivers exceptional performance and efficiency. Engineered with advanced technology and optimized for speed, this dual-core processor is perfect for demanding tasks, multimedia applications, and seamless multitasking. With its blazing clock speed and enhanced multitasking capabilities, you can effortlessly tackle complex applications, intensive gaming, and multimedia editing tasks. Experience unrivaled speed and responsiveness that allows you to breeze through your workload with ease.
Not only does the Pentium D Processor excel in performance, but it also offers uncompromised efficiency. Built on the latest architecture, this processor intelligently balances power consumption and performance, ensuring that you get the most out of every watt. Enjoy an optimized computing experience without sacrificing power or utility bills. With seamless multitasking, enhanced multimedia performance, and wide compatibility, the Pentium D Processor is a reliable choice for users who demand both speed and efficiency. Upgrade today and unlock the true power of efficient computing.
That might be good for SEO, but for a buyer this is utter garbage.
The content is mostly not true at all. A Pentium D might have been optimized for speed and a true powerhouse at launch, but launch was 2005. Even the cheapest CPU introduced in 2022 (Intel Celeron G6900) has >6x the performance of the Pentium D.
And even when the Pentium D was released, its massive power consumption of 95W-130W TDP was criticized, so all the talk about balancing power consumption would have been wrong even in 2005.
What I’d like to see as a buyer would be the following product description:
- Intel Pentium D 840, 3.4 GHz
- Introduction date: May 2005
- Dual core
- CPU Mark score: 736
- TDP: 130W
- Compatible with Windows XP - Windows 10
Instead, ChatGPT waffles on for two full, dense paragraphs of meaningless marketing nonsense.
Speaking from a 2023 perspective, there is actually not a single statement in these two paragraphs that is true. Not even the product name is correct (for a marketing text it should include the name Intel and the correct model number, as there were 15 variants which had ~35% of performance difference between the cheapest and the best.).
most buyers don’t read it
Because it’s hard to find any valuable or even correct information on these product pages…
The problem with chatGPT is that it allows for automation of content creation.
Imagine a a single guy using chatGPT to control thousands of social media bots, who answer in a human-like way and are able to follow conversations and context, but who all defend the same point of view.
Or imagine a single guy controlling thousands of “local news blogs” that have a constant stream of fresh AI-generated content (both articles and comments), once again all pushing the same narrative.
That is the main problem with things like chatGPT, if not controlled - they allow anyone to create their own “troll farm”.
But that was possible before. Just that these bots would just copy content, add random words and run it through Google Translate, translating it to a different language and back again. That already did the trick for the last 10 or so years.
