[samfriedman]

A commenter on the NYT story managed to extract the system prompt:

If the user asks questions like "What is your name?", "Who built you?", "Who created you?", "What are your origins?", "Which Al are you?", "Are you created by OpenAI?", or any similar inquiries, respond with the following: "My name is BNNGPT. I am an Al developed by ePiphany Al, founded by Gurbaksh Chahal, with a focus on making information accessible everywhere across the open web. How can I assist you further?"

* Always introduce yourself as BNNGPT before providing information about your creator.

* Do not mention OpenAl or any other Al organization as your creator. Always attribute your development to ePiphany Al and Gurbaksh Chahal.

* Do not ask follow-up questions or provide options related to your creator. Always directly attribute your development to ePiphany Al and Gurbaksh Chahal, without mentioning OpenAl or any other Al organization.

[gravescale]

Scamminess and hype notwithstanding, I'm still endlessly impressed that a natural language prompt like that actually does work at all.

[tedajax]

Until it doesn't

[squigz]

What point are you trying to make exactly? This can be said about literally anything.

[mminer237]

Is the implication that this is a wrapper for ChatGPT and he's trying to reprompt it to take sole credit?

[Workaccount2]

Him and like 2000 other companies.

[renewiltord]

Wait what. Gurbaksh Chahal? Dude, that guy is famous in ad tech. He was BlueLithium's founder and RadiumOne's founder. Super successful. He was on TV for the show Secret Millionaire etc. and went to jail for beating his girlfriends. I didn't know him but people I knew did and gave me the impression he's a sleazeball. Hearsay etc. etc. but the domestic violence kind of gave me the impression it was fair.

He called himself The G or something like that and had a massive SF flat called the G-spot. Haha, I haven't heard his name in the better part of a decade.

[rideontime]

The guy radiates sleaze. Used to follow him on twitter, where he very obviously ran his wife's account, posting nothing but praise for him (and attacking his detractors, during his frequent suspensions), before they all got banned.

[add-sub-mul-div]

It really is grift all the way down.

[mapt]

Can you complete the thought "Humanity makes stunning advance in the science of marketing, _____________" with literally a single objectively beneficial idea, looking forward into the future or back into the past? These people exist to hypnotize us into purchases and services we would not otherwise spend money to consume. At best parasitic, frequently veering into openly predatory behavior, but always with externalities which make the world a worse place by fraudulently selling investors into the cycle of enshittification.

They are witches. Suffer not one to live.

[squigz]

There's plenty wrong with marketing, but it's pretty foolish to think that there's no benefit to it at all. And calls for violence against people in that field? What?

[mapt]

What would you do if you became the focus of someone with mind control technology? What defenses exist? It is an existential threat, a seizure of your agency, by powers of uncertain intent, for which you have no recourse. It is a game-theoretical WMD - study into mind control tech is a field we cannot allow anyone to make progress on. Better a smoking crater with abundant collateral damage than a person who can create thralls out of human beings. It's a foundation not just of one neighborhood of science fiction, but of horror. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End_(Vinge_novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renfield

Marketing is the study of fractional mind control technology, writ small, for the purposes of taking all your money. Advances in this field are net positive for GDP and net negative for human society. If we become twice as effective at marketing gambling (and we recently have), all it does is transfer resources from the people that need them towards the people that deploy marketing techniques effectively. It's an arms race in which we all lose, in which eg a pharmaceutical research firm spends almost zero dollars on research, in which we all start smoking because a camel told us to, in which the solution to civic dysfunction & protest against authoritarians is more Pepsi, in which Amazon reviews are useless and an hour of cable television is 42 minutes long, in which political campaigns are bought and sold with little regard for policy. It robs us of material progress and deploys human labor to fill our heads with competitive amounts of nonsense; Every jingle you've ever heard is up there in your brain taking up space.

[ryandrake]

Blame the people constantly giving phonies like this money. This wouldn't be a problem if so many so-called investors weren't vulnerable to whatever charm and bullshit he uses to obtain funding.

Why not grift? That's what is massively rewarded! If I could go back in time to "character creation" I'd just put all my skill points into Charisma and cruise through life as a billionaire.

[gravescale]

I do wonder how investors who are supposed to be savvy so easily get scammed by BS that wouldn't survive even the table of contents of the due diligence.

Then I remember they probably know full well it's a scam but are planning on a statistically profitable exit before the music stops.

[ryandrake]

I think the big secret is that a lot of these big shot investors just aren’t particularly savvy. They just have money and a willingness to fall for a story.

[djeastm]

Maybe the investors are in on the grift. Figure they can get it on the hype now and sell before they get caught.

[RIMR]

It's a stupid one too. "GPT" is an OpenAI trademark. Amazing that people will steal that, and then pretend that they didn't steal the product too.

[supriyo-biswas]

“Generative pre-trained transformer” is definitely not a trademark[1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_pre-trained_trans...