It is sycophantic because OpenAI has many competitors now and flattery will get you everywhere.
When the product is free, you are the product. These Silicon Valley billionaire tech bros want your data. All your data. There’s concern about model collapse for one, but more importantly, knowing everything about you, including all those intimate personal details you might be reluctant to share with a personal therapist, will mean it’s easier to influence you. Eventually.
We are just getting worried about the impact of social media esp on the young. Generative AI is social media on steroids.
I teach university students. Gen AI is deskilling them before my eyes. From one year to the next, students now cannot write long form essays. In a recent lecture, none said they read books. It is an incredible convenience and has its uses esp for students with SpLDs. However, it is not just telling students what to write, but how to think.
That is a lot of power in the hands of a few white young men in California and their employers, the billionaires who flirt with far right populist thinking, seek political power and have untold wealth. Look up about Peter Thiel, or Sam Altman or Elon Musk or “Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them” Palantir CEO Alex Karp. None of these men are particularly supportive of women. AI is baked through with misogyny.
Survey results tell us that in HE, young men in stem subjects use it the most and colleagues in the medical school are worried. In creating a dependency on it, we are in big trouble. Cognitive skills including critical thinking are developed by honing them on common or low stakes scenarios. Outsourcing the easy stuff is ultimately to our detriment.
And yes, Gen ai consumes absolutely vast quantities of computational energy, water, critical metals and minerals. Mini nuclear reactors are being proposed all over the US to meet the energy needs of AI. It is environmentally devastating and is ruining the planet. A google search query uses approx a tablespoon of water. Four or five ChatGPT queries uses a 500ml bottle of water.
In terms of harvesting your data, my students also say "oh but I’m not doing anything wrong" so it doesn’t matter that their data is being collected and used by these firms. However, what is considered ’wrong’ depends on those in charge. Searching for information on pregnancy termination can now be problematic for women in certain US states now. Criticising the American president can now stop you from entering the US now. The stasi were not so long ago and China operates on a social credit system based on how compliant you are as a citizen. None of this is about convenience or helping us, it’s about data, information and control.
Please don’t use it, if you don’t have to. And if you use it, understand how your inputs are being used, what data is being collected about you and why. If your children use it, try to limit its use and educate them on it’s troubling outcomes.