He’s not selling anything specific and not to end users. You’re talking about something completely different. The way Sam and investors and corporate customers talk about AI is pretty misleading, but it’s not misleading users. No one looks at AI replacing CSRs and inventing new sciences, whatever the fuck that means, and jumps to it can unerringly diagnose a rash. And even if they did, the bot explicitly says not to trust it.

If some dirt farmer asks it how to avoid losing his family farm in a drought and takes ChatGPT’s advice to plant chocolate chips and loses the farm anyway, I suggest that’s a user error.

They don’t. They say we made this thing, see what you can do with it. They also put disclaimers on ChatGPT to say not to rely on it to be correct.

One can infer from that, that any use for which you are relying on accuracy is incorrect use. Which is why it’s critical to have any output filtered through a domain-capable human.

A pencil is a tool with a pretty wide open purpose within the writing ecosystem. It can be used to document history or remember a phone number or draw a picture.

You can also stab yourself in the eye with it or plan a murder.

That’s obviously bullshit but he’s not telling users they can develop time travel or something. That’s the distinction I would draw. He’s selling investment. That’s not where the end users that are misusing ChatGPT are at.

My observation is that largely it’s the downstream AI consumers who repackage it irresponsibly. That said, I don’t hang on the words of Sam Altman and it’s certain they are pushing the idea that AI is more capable than it is, but mostly what I see is them saying they built this thing and it does neat stuff and it can probably do neat stuff for you, use your imagination.

I believe a lot of the folks developing these tools would be horrified at the irresponsible ways vendors and end users are using it.

I have not seen OpenAI advertise ChatGPT as capable of medical diagnosis or therapy or anything like that. If you want therapy, and you can’t afford better — because I think we can agree that AI is terrible at it, then there should be a therapy app with explicit safety controls.

The problem is someone created a screwdriver which is handy for lots of screwdriver shaped purposes and someone is trying to carve a ham.

Does OpenAI claim ChatGPT is fit for those purposes? No.

The concrete itself will happily mix into your pancakes.

They put lives at risk the same way every single product at your local home improvement store does. When you misuse a tool for a purpose it wasn’t intended and isn’t good at, you’re going to get bad results.

This is an issue for the educational system, not the legal system.