According to an artificial intelligence expert, trusting ChatGPT about work engagements or political preferences can bite users.
Mike Wooldridge, a professor of AI at the University of Oxford, says it would be “highly unwise” to share private information or have a heart-to-heart with a chatbot, as any revelations help train future versions.
He added that users shouldn’t even expect a balanced response to their comments because technology “tells you what you want to hear”.
Wooldridge is exploring the topic of AI in this year’s Royal Institution Christmas Lectures. According to the institute, they will “look at the big questions facing AI research and unravel the myths about how this ground-breaking technology really works”.
He will discuss topics such as how a machine can be taught to translate from one language to another and how chatbots work. He will also address the question that surrounds AI: Can it ever be truly human-like?
Wooldridge told the Daily Mail that while humans were programmed to find consciousness in AI, it was a futile effort. AI, he said, “has no empathy. It has no empathy.”
“That’s not exactly what the technology is doing and, importantly, it’s never tested anything,” he added. “Technology is basically designed to try to tell you what you want to hear — literally that’s all it’s doing.”
He offered a sobering insight that “you should assume that anything you type into ChatGPT will just feed directly into future versions of ChatGPT”. And if upon reflection you decide you’ve exposed too much on ChatGPT, turning away isn’t really an option. According to Wooldridge, given how AI models work, it’s almost impossible to get your data back once it’s in the system.
A spokesperson for OpenAI, the organization behind ChatGPT, said: “In April, we introduced the ability to turn off chat history. Conversations that start when chat history is disabled help us train and improve our models. will not be used to make
During the lecture series, Wooldridge will be joined by leading figures from the AI world. The Royal Institution says they will also introduce “a range of robot friends, demonstrating what robots can – and can’t – do today”.
The Christmas Lectures were started by Michael Faraday in 1825 at the Royal Institution in London with the aim of engaging and educating young people about science. They first aired in 1936, making them the oldest science television series.
Lecturers include Nobel laureates William and Lawrence Bragg, Sir David Attenborough, Carl Sagan and Dame Nancy Rothwell.
The lectures will be broadcast on BBC Four and iPlayer on December 26, 27 and 28 at 8pm.