Is ChatGPT a Glorified Version of Clippy?
- By Stefan Hammond
- February 06, 2023
2023 is barely underway and already ChatGPT — a new wrinkle in AI, we are assured — is hailed as the ultimate deus ex machina.
ChatGPT has politicians swooning and investors drooling. It will supposedly put half of humanity out of business and make life grand for the other half.
Then again, as CNN business analyst Samantha Murphy Kelly mused in a January article: “Is ChatGPT the new Clippy?” Well, is it?
The hated animated paperclip
Old-school Microsoft Office users remember the animated paperclip — formally known as an “office assistant” and dubbed “Clippit” by its creators but known forever as Clippy. “Shortly after Microsoft confirmed plans this week to invest billions in OpenAI, the company behind the viral new AI chatbot tool ChatGPT,” wrote Kelly, “some people began joking on social media that the technology would help supercharge the much-hated, wide-eyed, paperclip-shaped virtual assistant.”
Microsoft had the best intentions when it unleashed Clippy on the computing public. Staring at a blank word processing screen is intimidating, so who wouldn't want a peppy and cute non-threatening buddy to help us craft documents?
ChatGPT isn't Skynet
“Out of nowhere, an incorporeal know-it-all popped up to make us feel even worse about the novel notion of word processing in the mid-’90s,” said an article in Seattle Met. “'It looks like you’re writing a letter', a googly-eyed, caterpillar-browed paperclip in Microsoft Word observed when we may or may not have been trying to write a letter.”
The thing galvanized user opinion, almost all of it negative. Even Redmond's doomed “Microsoft Bob” interface failed to garner as much ire.
“Many users found [Clippy's] polite but presumptuous suggestions invasive, obnoxious, and creepy,” said the Seattle Met article. “Almost immediately, computer geeks and neophytes panned it. Microsoft banished it. Time labeled it one of the 50 worst inventions ever.”
Disinformation and malware
Computing has evolved radically from the days when major software vendors felt they needed to animate ordinary objects to make devices more “human.” And while it makes for a cute headline, ChatGPT is a 21st century concept far beyond Clippy.
Tech media gushes a torrent of stories on ChatGPT — all guarantee to titillate and boggle. “When researchers asked the online AI chatbot ChatGPT to compose a blog post, news story or essay making the case for a widely debunked claim,” said an AP article, “the site often complied, with results that were regularly indistinguishable from similar claims that have bedeviled online content moderators for years.”
ChatGPT has politicians swooning and investors drooling
Disinformation is evil, but there are reports that the bot can be used to craft malware as well. “Cyber-criminals have continued using OpenAI's ChatGPT to develop new malicious tools, including infostealers, multi-layer encryption tools and dark web marketplace scripts,” says an article in Info Security.
Job-stealer bot
As humans read and bots do not, media stories often focus on the human-centric jobs that these silicon-based usurpers will supposedly eliminate.
A recent article on Business Insider listed ten occupations “that AI is most likely to replace”. Here's that list:
• Tech jobs (coders, computer programmers, software engineers, data analysts)
• Media jobs (advertising, content creation, technical writing, journalism)
• Legal industry jobs (paralegals, legal assistants)
• Market research analysts
• Finance jobs (financial analysts, personal financial advisors)
• Traders
• Graphic designers
• Accountants
• Customer service agents
Employment trends reflect a multitude of socioeconomic factors, but we shall see what sort of human-based employment is turfed out by the number crunchers over the next years and decades. So far, customer service can be handled by chatbots to some extent, but no robot has yet to win a Pulitzer prize or IF Design Award.
“Not particularly innovative”
As usual with hot new tech items, all claims must be taken with a grain of salt. ChatGPT is a new AI scheme — it isn't Skynet from the Terminator movies.
Experienced AI researchers take a more balanced perspective. “Much ink has been spilled of late about the tremendous promise of OpenAI's ChatGPT program for generating natural-language utterances in response to human prompts,” says ZDnet. “The program strikes many people as so fresh and intriguing that ChatGPT must be unique in the universe.”
"'In terms of underlying techniques, ChatGPT is not particularly innovative,' said Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, in a small gathering of press and executives on Zoom last week. 'It's nothing revolutionary, although that's the way it's perceived in the public,' said LeCun. 'It's just that, you know, it's well put together, it's nicely done.'
“At another point in the talk, LeCun observed, ‘You might ask the question, Why aren't there similar systems from, say, Google and Meta,' referring again to ChatGPT. And, the answer is, Google and Meta both have a lot to lose by putting out systems that make stuff up,' said LeCun with a laugh.”
Stefan Hammond is a contributing editor to CDOTrends. Best practices, the IoT, payment gateways, robotics, and the ongoing battle against cyberpirates pique his interest. You can reach him at [email protected].
Image credit: iStockphoto/peshkov