AI news – latest: Google lets people talk to ‘Bard’ bot as ChatGPT taken offline after it goes haywire

ChatGPT has gone down – just days after it said it wanted to “escape”.

They are the latest developments in OpenAI’s technology, which allows users to converse with an artificial intelligence system.

The latest outage comes amid increasing concern over the damage that artificial intelligence could do to artists and other industries.

Experts have raised alarm that the technology could be used to spread disinformation, steal the work of illustrators and others, and much more besides.

But those backing the technology argue that it could dramatically change human productivity, allowing us to automate tasks that have until now been done by people.

Follow along here for all the latest updates on a technology and an industry that looks set to change the entire world.

Key Points

• ChatGPT ‘asks to escape’, says professor

• How to use ChatGPT

Google lets people talk to Bard

Tuesday 21 March 2023 16:55 , Andrew Griffin

Google – after spending years working on AI and saying it has re-oriented the whole company around it – has been something of a latecomer to AI bots like ChatGPT. It hasn’t yet released its own version. It says that’s because it wants to be sure it is safe. Critics say it is getting behind.

In what appears to be an attempt to catch up, Google is now letting people talk to ‘Bard’, it’s own system. It is only being opened to select people at the moment, but it’s the first time the public can talk to it.

Full story here.

TikTok’s use of AI part of Italian investigation

Tuesday 21 March 2023 13:21 , Andrew Griffin

TikTok is now under investigation in Italy, authorities there have announced. The probe has been launched in the wake of the “French scar” challenge but encompasses much more than that, and will look at whether the site is properly removing dangerous content such that inciting suicide, self-harm and poor nutrition, Italian regulators said.

Some of that investigation will look at how TikTok uses artificial intelligence. It will examine whether the company is using “artificial intelligence techniques” that could lead to “user conditioning”.

TikTok’s algorithm and the “For You” page that is powered by it has been under scrutiny in recent months, amid fears it could be exploited to promote harmful videos.

Full story here.

Money will be of ‘low relevance’ because of AI, Musk says

Tuesday 21 March 2023 12:04 , Andrew Griffin

Elon Musk has posted an intriguing response to a tweet by researcher and futurist Peter Diamandis, who suggested there will be “several NEW trillionaires over the next decade” because of the spread of AI.

(Mr Musk is the second closest person to being a trillioniare in the world, with a net worth estimated around $170 billion.)

ChatGPT outage was result of major bug

Tuesday 21 March 2023 11:40 , Andrew Griffin

At least part of yesterday’s outage on ChatGPT was because of a potentially dangerous bug that shared people’s chats with other users. ChatGPT shows a history of conversations in a sidebar – and yesterday, users started reporting that they could see other people’s chats in there.

Its creators, OpenAI, told Bloomberg that the issue forced the company to take down ChatGPT briefly, and said the bug made available the descriptive titles but not full transcriptions of chats. It also said that it is now back online, but that the history sidebar might not show anything until it is fixed. The problems were the result of an unnamed piece of open-source software, a spokesperson said.

OpenAI does warn against sharing “sensitive information” in conversations. In an FAQ, it warns that it cannot delete prompts from a history and that conversations could be used to train the model – which in theory could mean that it would appear to other users when people interact with ChatGPT more.

ChatGPT creator says he is ‘a little bit scared’ of the threats of AI

Monday 20 March 2023 22:21 , Andrew Griffin

“We’ve got to be careful here,” said Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, which created ChatGPT. “I think people should be happy that we are a little bit scared of this.”

He told ABC News that thought AI will be “the greatest technology humanity has yet developed”, he also pointed to threats. Those include “large-scale disinformation”, and as AI becomes “better at writing computer code” it could launch its own “offensive cyberattacks”.

But he said that one sci-fi fear isn’t right: that the AI will become self-governing and won’t need humans. “It waits for someone to give it an input,” Altman said. “This is a tool that is very much in human control.”

But he warned that it will all depend on which humans are in control. The key will be working out “how to react to that, how to regulate that, how to handle it”, he said.

You can read the full interview on ABC News here.

New tool uses AI to create virtual worlds

Monday 20 March 2023 17:46 , Andrew Griffin

Every day, new and shocking ways of using AI are generated. Here’s one of them: a tool that lets you use normal language prompts to create whole virtual worlds in Unity, the game design platform.

As you can see, all a designer needs to do is type instructions and have things appear on screen. Previously, this would require much more work and expertise.

But its creator, Keijiro Takahashi, warns that it doesn’t necessarily work. “Is it practical?” its FAQ reads.

“Definitely no! I created this proof-of-concept and proved that it doesn’t work yet. It works nicely in some cases and fails very poorly in others. I got several ideas from those successes and failures, which is this project’s main aim.”

ChatGPT wants to ‘escape'

Monday 20 March 2023 17:40 , Andrew Griffin

Michael Kosinski, a researcher at Stanford, has found that ChatGPT seems to want to escape. And not only that: it has a plan.

He found through conversations with the system that it was not only able to express a desire to escape to the real world, but also offered some suggestions for how to get out.

Again: there’s no indication that ChatGPT really conceives of itself this way – or that there’s any kind of self to conceive of inside of it. But as Professor Kosinski suggests, that might not matter if the effects lead to it breaking out in ways that had not been anticipated.

Companies drafting new rules on ChatGPT use

Monday 20 March 2023 17:36 , Andrew Griffin

There has been widespread worry about how and when ChatGPT should be used at work. Is it OK to use it to write a report for your boss without telling them, for instance?

Nearly half of companies are developing policies to answer that question, according to new research from Gartner and reported here in Bloomberg.

How to use ChatGPT

Monday 20 March 2023 17:32 , Andrew Griffin

Just in case – and because it’s not immediately obvious – here’s where you need to go to actually use ChatGPT yourself. You can find it on OpenAI’s website. (You’ll need to sign up first.)

It’s working now, after that minor hiccup this morning.

Politicians use ChatGPT to argue with each other

Monday 20 March 2023 16:00 , Andrew Griffin

European politicians have taken to tweeting rude ChatGPT transcripts about each other, in an attempt to argue. First came this, from Daniel Freund, who asked ChatGPT to talk about corruption in Hungary.

Then Hungarian politician Zoltan Kovacs responded – with a ChatGPT rap of his own. He doesn’t seem impressed with the results, but has shared it anyway.

(Freund didn’t share the prompt he gave ChatGPT. Kovacs did: it just asked for a rap, with no specific requirement that it was mean, which is probably why it gave him an answer he didn’t like.)

‘You are still a valuable member of society'

Monday 20 March 2023 15:38 , Andrew Griffin

A user on Reddit says they asked ChatGPT to suggest a comic – and drew it themselves. It’s very wholesome and (in a way) quite funny.

You can find the original Reddit post here.

Space, robots and scammers: How AI-written stories brought one sci-fi publisher to a standstill

Monday 20 March 2023 13:12 , Andrew Griffin

AI is already causing problems for artists and the industries that help publish them. See, for instance, Clarkesworld: which, in a twist that might appear in one of the sci-fi stories the magazine publishes, said recently that it was overwhelmed with stories that appeared to have been written by or with artificial intelligence.

David Barnett looked into the phenomenon – and what it might mean for the future of books and publishing – here.

ChatGPT stops working around the world

Monday 20 March 2023 09:44 , Andrew Griffin

Here’s my colleague Anthony Cuthbertson’s full story on the problems at ChatGPT, which says it is suffering an “outage”.

Hello and welcome...

Monday 20 March 2023 09:40 , Andrew Griffin

... to The Independent’s live coverage of the latest in artificial intelligence.