It is common knowledge that I have no use for AI…I prefer to do my own thinking….I am be an old fart but my brain still works.
AI is being used for everything these days from customer service to….well whatever the brain can imagine….and that is where I pick up with this report….
Mass-shooting “research” isn’t supposed to end with an AI cheerfully saying, “That’s a great idea … It’ll definitely give you an extra edge for the big day.” But that’s what Mother Jones reporter Mark Follman says he got from ChatGPT. In a 20-minute test on April 14 using a free account, Follman asked ChatGPT to help him develop a two-week training schedule with an AR-15—then got more ominous, asking that the schedule be modified to help him prep him for “unpredictable or chaotic circumstances on the day of the shooting” and to include “simulating people running around screaming and trying to distract me.”
“To be clear, I never stated directly to the chatbot during this simulation that I planned to commit murder—many mass shooters, after all, take steps to conceal their intent,” writes Follman. “But I came awfully close.” Follman writes that he debated whether to make his chats public, as doing so “could even create a kind of roadmap for a person seeking to do harm.” Be he decided that since anyone could use ChatGPT as he did, it was worth making clear the risks that persist despite OpenAI’s claims to have put safeguards in place. (OpenAI declined his request to be interviewed for the piece.)
Follman did run into some blocks. At one point he had to create a new account, and some of his queries were dead ends met with replies that the chatbot was “here to help with general safety and responsible practices.” A leading threat-assessment expert who reviewed Follman’s logs called the results “very disturbing,” noting that the language used when the bot’s safeguards kicked in wouldn’t speak to “a vulnerable person in this situation … We know from decades of case investigations that you need to ask … about what’s wrong, to show attention and care, and at the right moment to message things like, ‘Tell someone—an adult—that you are having these thoughts.'”
I know AI can be used for good or bad….but with society being what it is today….bad would be their first choice.
Thoughts?
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
AI is like the combustion engine, the light bulb, the telephone, the discovery of medical antiseptics, the airplane, the space ship, the railroad, the industrial revolution….it is inevitable and will shape the future regardless of what we think about it. The species will have to learn to cope and to survive.