- Mike Wooldridge warns that ChatGPT should not hear your political views
Complaining about your boss or expressing political views to ChatGPT is ‘extremely unwise’, according to an Oxford don.
Mike Wooldridge said the AI tool should not be seen as a trusted confidant because it could get you into hot water.
Anything you say to the ‘chatbot’ will help train future versions, he added, and the technology just ‘tells you what you want to hear’.
The AI professor is giving the Royal Institution’s Christmas lectures this year and will tackle the ‘truth’ about the subject.
He said humans were programmed to look for consciousnesses – but we ‘attribute it far, far too often’.
Complaining about your boss or expressing political views to ChatGPT is ‘extremely unwise’, according to an Oxford don
Mike Wooldridge said the AI tool should not be seen as a trusted confidant because it could get you into hot water
Comparing the idea of finding personalities in chatbots to seeing faces in the clouds, he said of AI: ‘It has no empathy. It has no sympathy.
‘That’s absolutely not what the technology is doing and crucially, it’s never experienced anything. The technology is basically designed to try to tell you what you want to hear – that’s literally all it’s doing.’
Treating it as anything more than this was particularly risky because ‘you should assume that anything you type into ChatGPT is just going to be fed directly into future versions of ChatGPT’.
He said it would be ‘extremely unwise to start having personal conversations or complaining about your relationship with your boss, or expressing your political opinions’.
Professor Wooldridge added that, due to the way AI models worked, it was also nearly impossible to get your data back once it was in the system. Earlier this year the company behind ChatGPT, OpenAI, had to fix a bug that allowed users to see parts of other users’ chat histories.
The firm promises to hold on to them for only 30 days and avoid using them to train the chatbot.
The lectures will be broadcast on BBC Four and iPlayer on December 26, 27 and 28 at 8pm.
By Daily Mail Online, December 25, 2023