It Is And It Is

Last night ChatGPT had a bug. But not your run-of-the-mill problem like increased latency or complete unavailability. No, it went completely off-the-rails: spouting gibberish, repeating itself ad infinitum, and other nonsensical behavior.

Hilarious though some of the outputs were, it was a powerful reminder that AI technologies are still new and mysterious, and definitely require human oversight. While this incident ended up with random output, I can now imagine a whole class of bugs where language model outputs are wrong in all manner of specifically bad ways. Humorous now, but perhaps less so once we give them agency to act on our behalf.

I anticipate the day coming when I ask my personal Scarlett Johansson to book a family vacation to Fiji and it instead sends an email to my mom lambasting her for wearing white after Labor Day and then sells my living room furniture on eBay.

The future’s going to be something else, of that we can be sure.