The Corbett Report

4 hr ago

by James Corbett
corbettreport.com
February 19, 2023

It’s official: the chatpocalypse is upon us!

Just ask our <sarc>friends</sarc> over at The New York Times:

“A Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled”

Or consult the <sarc>experts</sarc> over at digitaltrends:

“‘I want to be human.’ My intense, unnerving chat with Microsoft’s AI chatbot”

Or listen to those <haha>wackadoodles</haha> over at NewWorldNextWeek discussing the latest chatbot scare story:

“Microsoft’s Bing AI Chatbot Starts Threatening People”

“OK, OK, we get it, James! The new generation of chatbots that have been unleashed upon the world are weird, creepy and strangely aggressive. So we’re all going to die in a fiery robotic catastrophe, right?”

Maybe not. But before you breathe a sigh of relief and go back to whatever it is you’re doing, let me assure you that this chatbot takeover really is bad news, but probably not for the reasons you think.

RISE OF THE CHATBOTS

You really must have been in a coma for the past few months if you haven’t heard about the latest generation of chatbot technology. People are ranting about it. Vloggers are suffering existential crises over it. Alternative media pundits are having a field day with video thumbnails featuring HAL 9000 and T-800. (Hey, I’m not claiming not to be one of those pundits!)

The maelstrom began on November 30, 2022, when OpenAI launched Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, better known as ChatGPT. I won’t bore you with the technical details of ChatGPT because—as I will explain in a moment—they really aren’t important, but instead I’ll draw your attention to the strange, non-profit/for-profit “research laboratory” from whose bowels this technology has been excreted.

You’ll remember OpenAI from my 2017 editorial on “The Brain Chip Cometh,” in which I noted that the lab had recently been founded with the financial support of technocratic huckster Elon Musk and his fellow PayPal Mafia members Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman. OpenAI describes itself as “an AI research and deployment company” whose mission “is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity,” but if the company’s roster of billionaire backers, Bilderberg boosters and CIA-contractor cronies don’t get your spidey sense tingling, then you need a new spidey sense.

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