GPT-3 is just a tool. If a product that uses it messes up you can hardly blame it on the tool but rather on that product or the company developing it (here Nabla).
Chatting with random people on the internet is much more unpredictable. Try writing on 4chan that you are depressed and gasp in horror how horrible humans can be when anonymous.
Okay maybe it is indeed very predictable what would happen on 4chan, but I hope you get my point.
Here the AI is just a tool, we shouldn't categorize them as some "special" software.
> Chatting with random people on the internet is much more unpredictable
Not particularly the best comparison, we are talking here about applications and services which we sell and we have to make sure that we have the confidence that we can trust our own systems and the customer can rely on our word and engineering skills. Right now we are still in the primordial soup of AI. As long as we do not have proper methods to verify and certify our models, they are dangerous and unpredictable.
You are comparing apples and oranges. "generating content" does not yet say HOW the data is generated. Here we are specifically talking about probabilistic generative model, which are inherently unsuited for mission critical purposes, as they are engineered right now.
I don't need to do this discussion, this is basic introductory education and consent in University courses about AI and especially about system engineering verification and certification, which is required for most customers on a large scale and mission critical purposes.
Those boards have better moderation, something you need regardless of AI, which is my point.
AI doesn't add more danger to the situation, you just need to moderate as usual. If you are using some computer program to add more content to your web site, you will just have more content to moderate. News aggregators do have this problem for example, as sometimes automated crawlers post sensitive content and that needs to be marked & deleted before being published.
Saying, "oh but our algorithm can cause depression, so we moderate the access to it" doesn't make sense, as any content can cause it and needs to be moderated.
That's why content moderation is one of the hardest problems of this age.
You use computers to do it? Computers develop biases. Humans? Same! It's very hard to scale and is a problem only remotely related to AI-generated content because AI generating content increases the input to your moderation system.
You can frame anything being "a tool". But if you want to stay within your logic, then this is a very specific "tool", it is supposed to directly interact with people, not machine to machine, and as such it can have consequences which are unpredictable. And no, human to human interaction is mostly NOT unpredictable, we act according to social norms and have common sense, otherwise you're not a proper human.
This is not a new issue but is heavily researched in the certifiable AI area.
If you just turning million knobs randomly based on an architecture and the biased data you have, of course you don't really known what you are doing.
It really doesn’t matter what it ‘is’ or if it makes sense to speak of things in moral categories. There are plenty of ‘tools’ that are/should be restricted, from guns to Tucker Carlson.
It can obviously have some effect on the so-called ‘real world’, or people wouldn’t pour money into developing & using it. It would be a unique feat to be powerful with no chance of any of the effects being harmful.
From there, it’s just arithmetics: what harms and benefits do we expect with what probabilities, and how does this change depending on the distribution scheme?