Chapter 6: GPT-3: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Every technological revolution brings controversy. In this section we focus on four of the most controversial aspects of GPT-3: AI bias being encoded into the model; low-quality content and the spread of misinformation; GPT-3’s environmental footprint; and data privacy issues. When you mix human biases with a powerful tool capable of producing huge quantities of seemingly coherent text, the results can be dangerous.
The fluency and coherence of much of GPT-3’s text output raise several risks because people are prepared to interpret it as meaningful. Many also view the human developers involved in creating GPT-3-based apps as “authors” of its output and demand that they be held accountable for its contents.
The risks we consider in this chapter follow from the nature of GPT-3’s training data, which is to say, the English-speaking internet. Human language reflects our worldviews...
