ChatGPT's Intentional Weakness

I'm pretty sure that a lot of you are already aware of what ChatGPT is. It's all over Twitter after it reached a million users within just 5 days after launch. Can you believe that? A million users within just 5 days, beating many services that are already part of our lives today.

Now I've been trying it for awhile now, having fun with it and found that it is quite useful already. I used it to generate Rust code and get summaries of various works.

It still fails on many things, many things that I think are very simple, so one must be careful to take its advice and should always verify as it can mislead sometimes, which is also stated on the screen that appears everytime I open it on my browser. It failed for example to give me a list of famous people who have the same birthday as me. It kept on giving me people with different birthdays, including Taylor Swift whose birth month is totally different from mine.

I found one great weakness though that I think the developers intentionally put on the algos. Now I haven't verified if it has been mitigated or fixed as what I know is that they have upgraded it already even before I published this article but it seems to willfully decline any question that might disadvantage a certain group of people even if you're just asking for statistics.

Now I love the intention, I'm gay and Asian, but it makes it bad for research, which is one of the fields we expect it to be used at. Other than that, it kept on giving repetitive statements that I wish I could turn off, it kept on advising me that everyone is different, and that what it just said don't apply to everyone, which everyone I think in their sane minds should know already in this very globalized world.

I think the developers are too concerned that it might attract unwanted attention if it gets labeled as racist, sexist or whatever but wouldn't all these things hold us back? We all know already that there are exceptions in everything, it has been proven again and again, but that shouldn't be a reason for us to not have statistics on which ethnicities have better immune systems against certain diseases and if what they have in common is the reason for the boost. I think it will be best for all of us to seek truth again and actually learn more about each other rather than avoiding everything that might hurt each other's egos and feelings. I think we all still have a lot to learn from each other.

These are just my thoughts. I think it will be best for everyone to be civil and discuss these matters so we can decide what is the best way to move forward. Hoping also to see more from other companies, like Google, Apple and Amazon after ChatGPT took all the attention.

You can try ChatGPT by clicking here. And don't forget to subscribe.